
ass. 



3 La. 4,0 

Book .34-9 



Copyright N° 

COPyRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



THE NEW WORLD 



AND 



THE NEW THOUGHT 



BY 
JAMES THOMPSON BIXBY.Ph.D. 

Author of "The Ethics of Evolution," "Religion and Science as Allies.''* 



i 3 i . J 



NEW YORK 

THOMAS WHITTAKER 

2 and 3 Bible House 

1902 



V 



CONGRESS, 
Two Oow* Receive* 

I. 13 1902 
ptA^^XXc 1**. 

CQFf 3. 



Copyright, 1902 

by 

James Thompson Bixby 



;JV 



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THE CAXTON PRESS 
NEW YORK. 



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£ 



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Contents. 



CHAP. PAGE 

I. The Expansion of the Universe and the Enlarge- 
ment of Faith 5 

II. The Sanction for Morality in Nature 30 

III. The Agnostic's Difficulties and the Knowability 

of Divine Realities -54 

IV. The Scientific Validity of Our Religious Instincts, 98 
V. Evolution and Christianity 116 

VI. The Old Testament as Literature 137 

VII. Christian Discipleship and Modern Life 163 

VIII. Modern Dogmatism and the Unbelief of the Age, 180 

IX. Union of the Churches in One Spiritual House- 
hold 199 



The New World and The New 
Thought 



CHAPTER I. 



THE EXPANSION OF THE UNIVERSE AND THE ENLARGE- 
MENT OF FAITH. 

As the traveler visits the old shrines and cathedrals 
of Europe, or the scholar delves among the mediaeval 
treatises on astronomy or geography, he is continu- 
ally meeting with conceptions of the world and its 
creation of a most curious and childlike simplicity. A 
frequently recurring group in the sculptures, mosaics, 
stained-glass or missal paintings of the Middle Ages is 
that which represents the Almighty in human form, 
moulding the sun, moon, or stars, and with His own 
hands hanging them from the solid firmament which 
supports the upper heaven and its celestial waters and 
which overarches the great plain of earth ; and when 
the work of the six days is finished He is represented 
as sitting, bent and fatigued, in the well-known atti- 
tude of the " Weary Mercury " of classical sculpture. 
As late as the seventeenth century, Milton, in his 
poetic representation of the popular theology of his 
day, does not hesitate at the most literal description 

5 



6 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

of how the second person in the Trinity, when the 
hour for making the universe came 

" Took the golden compasses, prepared 
In God's eternal store, to circumscribe 
This universe and all created things. 
One foot He centred, and the other turned 
Round through the vast profundity obscure, 
And said, * Thus far extend ; thus far thy bounds : 
This be thy just circumference, O world/ " 

The two statements in the Genesis myths, that the 
world was made in six days and also that " God spake 
and it was done," were both of them accepted in the 
most literal way by the great ecclesiastical and scien- 
tific authorities of Christendom down to the sixteenth 
century. The contradiction of an instantaneous crea- 
tion which lasted through six days was usually recon- 
ciled by some explanation, like that of St. Thomas 
Aquinas, which was adopted even by Luther and the 
earlier Protestant Reformers, viz. : that God created 
the substance of the world in a single moment but 
employed the six days in separating, shaping and 
further adorning it. As to the date of this great 
event, it was the general verdict of both Catholic and 
Protestant authorities down to a century or two ago 
that it could hardly be more than 6,000 years ago. 

As to the shape and dimensions of the world, the 
prevalent ideas during the Middle Ages were marked 
by a precision and pettiness equally crude. Follow- 
ing unreflectingly the lead of whatever, imagery the 
Scripture presented, they insisted that the earth was 
at creation vaulted over with a solid dome or ceiling, 
the firmament of Genesis, above which was the celes- 



THE EXPANSION OF THE UNIVERSE 7 

tial cistern, containing the waters which are above the 
firmament. It is through apertures in this vault, " the 
windows of heaven," that the rains are allowed to fall 
on the earth by God and His angels ; and above it, in 
the third heaven, or seventh as others said, is the 
customary abode of the Almighty and His court. In 
the curious description of the universe, based upon 
Scripture, written in the sixth century by Cosmas In- 
dicopleustes, which for a long while was regarded as 
most authoritative, the ideas of the early Christian 
theologians were summed up in a complete system. 
As in the ninth chapter of Hebrews the world is 
likened to the tabernacle in the desert, it must be 
oblong in shape. Like the table of shew-bread, the 
earth is flat, and twice as long as broad, 400 days' 
journey one way and 200 the other. It is surrounded 
by four seas, at the outer edges of which rise massive 
walls, the pillars of heaven of which Job speaks, on 
which the vault of heaven rests. The disappearance 
of the sun at night is caused by its passing behind a 
great mountain at the north of the earth. 

Although by the scholars of subsequent centuries 
this naive representation of the world was much re- 
fined and modified, yet the general conception of the 
universe as a sort of huge house, with heaven as its 
upper story and the earth as its lower story, prevailed 
among the people and a large part of the world of 
scholars, close down to the modern period. 

When the sky-parlor of the heavenly host was so 
little a way off, legends of saints and prophets caught 
up to heaven or of angels flying down to earth, of 
heavenly voices speaking from the upper story to 



8 THE NEW WOULD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

i 

chosen men on the lower, or of frequent special inter- 
ventions by heavenly powers to rescue the holy or 
punish the wicked, would most naturally arise. Even 
when men's conceptions began to enlarge, they still 
remained comparatively diminutive. Certain Egyp- 
tian astronomers, says Flammarion, calculated that the 
sun was 369 miles distant and Saturn 492. An 
Italian system, that the same astronomer mentions, 
was on a somewhat more generous scale. The crys- 
talline sphere in which the moon was set was 107,000 
miles distant, Mercury 209,000 and the sun 3,892,000. 
As late as the sixteenth century, Zwingli and the 
early Protestant Reformers held to the view of the 
church fathers that a solid floor or dome separated the 
heavens from the earth, that above it were the waters 
and the abode of the angels, and below it the earth 
and man. And in the cellar of this world-house, not 
far below the earth's crust, popular superstition, cor- 
roborated by the authority of great poets like Virgil, 
Dante, and Milton, located the caverns of the under- 
world, from which imp and devil and perturbed spirit 
came up at times to walk the earth. 

To-day, how has science stretched out this baby- 
house universe of our ancestors ! The astronomer 
has turned his telescope on that adamantine firmament 
and it has dissolved into thin air. The glittering 
points that gemmed its surface have expanded into 
enormous suns, thousands of times as large as our own 
globe. The petty heaven of the Book of Revelation 
12,000 furlongs or 1,379 English miles' each way 
has spread out, from that one-twentieth part or less 
Qf the cubic dimensions which we now know our own 



THE EXPANSION OF THE UNIVERSE 9 

earth to have, into an immensity of space which it is 
difficult to realize. Let us try by a few facts to give 
some conception of its grandeur. 

Milton, in " Paradise Lost," in accordance with the 
older ideas of the size of the universe, thought that 
nine days was an adequate length of time for the rebel 
archangel, who was thrown out of heaven, to fall down 
from the top of the universe and the courts of God to 
the depths of hell. But we now know that if a steam- 
ship, moving at the average rate, had started in 
Columbus' lifetime for the sun, it would not have 
reached its goal to-day. If a baby were put in an ex- 
press train, moving at highest locomotive speed, to go 
to our solar luminary, the baby would die of old age 
before it could arrive there. If that locomotive went 
onward towards our nearest fixed star, stopping 
neither day nor night, it would take it 700,000 cen- 
turies to get there.' 

The speed of a locomotive is evidently too slow a 
standard to use as a measure among these immense 
spaces. Let us take, then, for our imaginary courier, 
the fastest traveler we know of, the wave of sunlight, 
speeding 186,000 miles a second. How long would 
it take even a beam of sunlight to reach the nearest 
sun beyond our own ? Not less than three and one 
quarter years; for it is no less than 20,000,000,000 
miles away. If we should want to go to Sirius and 
could get the same lightning courier, the waves of the 
starlight, to take us, it would require twenty-two 
years. To get to the pole star it would take fifty 
years ; to pass from one end to the other of the Milky 
Way, that great star-cluster nearest to us, it would 



10 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

take a ray of light 15,000 years. To reach a star of 
the fourteenth magnitude would require 100,000 
years. 

By the naked eye we can see some 6,000 stars, each 
a sun, all at such immense intervals from one another. 
But the telescope discerns 45,000,000 stars and nebulae ; 
the photographic eye, more subtle still, might take 
the record, it is calculated, of 160,000,000 stars. 
There are over 1,000 nebulae which the telescope 
resolves into swarms of stars. These are supposed to 
be great groups, similar to our Milky Way, dimmed 
and drawn together, apparently by the immense dis- 
tance at which they are situated. In that case, how 
far off are they ? Over 300 times as far as the farthest 
suns in our Milky Way ; and it would take the nimble 
messenger of light 4,000,000 years to get there. 
How huge must these suns be that can send the un- 
dulations of their light across such enormous space ! 
Into what amazing pettiness has astronomy shriveled 
our proud centre of the universe, and, dislodging it 
from its former prominent position, sent it whirling on 
its way as one of the smaller satellites in the train of a 
central body, the sun, which, though as much larger 
than the earth as a cart-wheel is larger than a pea, is 
yet but one of more than 20,000,000 suns contained 
in its own part of space, and is itself not stationary, 
but revolving through space, with its fleet of planets, 
at the rate of 4,000 miles a day, around perhaps some 
still larger sun. 

Verily, these infinities of space set the tirain reeling, 
in the vain effort to realize them. Let us turn, then, 
to the changes in our estimates of the earth's duration 



THE EXPANSION OF THE UNIVERSE 11 

and our ideas of time. Here, again, how enormously 
has science multiplied the numbers ! How utterly in- 
adequate are those dates for man's first appearance on 
the globe and the beginning of the earth that were 
generally accepted one hundred years ago and are still 
printed in the margin of the Bibles issued by our 
Bible societies ! It was in the year 4004 b. c, accord- 
ing to the great chronological authority and theo- 
logian, Archbishop Usher,- that the creation of the 
world took place, a date settled by the authority of 
the Holy Bible ; and Dr. Lightfoot, Vice-Chancellor 
of Cambridge University, in the seventeenth century, 
with still finer precision, fixed the day and hour at the 
23d of October at nine o'clock in the morning. 
Luther declared, on the authority of Moses, that 
longer ago than 6,000 years the world did not exist. 
Pope Urban VII was anxious to allow a little more 
time to have elapsed since the creation of man ; but 
his extreme limit was 5199 b. c. 

To-day these sixty centuries are but a handbreadth 
of the time that science demands. Sixty millenniums 
would hardly suffice. Science has mined in caverns 
and found man's tools and weapons among the bones 
of mammoths. It has deciphered hieroglyphics and 
found arts and history already venerable before the 
date when commentators admitted that Adam had 
begun to breathe. As far back as 6,000 and 7,000 years 
before Christ, among the cities and temples of Baby- 
lonia and Egypt, man was living a civilized or semi- 
civilized life. For the quarternary age, in the early 
part of which unmistakable relics of man are found, 
geology demands a period of at least 10,000 years. 



12 THE NEW WORLD AND TEE NEW THOUGHT 

For the tertiary and secondary epochs, and the im- 
mensely thick deposits belonging to them, not less 
than 3,000,000 years will suffice. For the primary and 
primeval or azoic ages, not less than 17,000,000 
years more are needed. Recall what vast beds of 
chalk and limestone, miles in thickness, have been 
built up by the microscopic creatures who have lived 
and died in the primitive oceans ; how from a fiery 
cloud the globe concentrated to a molten ball, and on 
the molten ball formed the crust that now suspends 
us above the still furnace-heated interior. How long 
a time should we estimate for these 3eonic changes ? 
From the experiments of the physicist, Bischoff, with 
molten basalt and its rate of cooling to a solid state, 
the scientists infer that for the earth to cool from the 
2,000 degrees centigrade of the former molten state 
down to 200 centigrade, would require at least 
350,000,000 years. Then for the condensation of 
our solar nebula, (originally extending beyond the 
orbit of Neptune, i. e. 9 5,000,000,000 miles in diam- 
eter), into the sun and planets, and the further cool- 
ing down from the heated solid state to the temper- 
ature where life could begin, additional millions of 
years would be required; and when we recall how 
many thousand times larger than our sun are many of 
the solar globes, is not the chronology of the heavens 
carried back into an antiquity, in comparison with 
whose veritable eternity the age of those hills that of 
old were dubbed " everlasting " seems but as a single 
breath of a summer's insect. 

Such is the amazing immensity of the universe that 
modern science has disclosed, an illimitable extension 



THE EXPANSION OF THE UNIVERSE 13 

and duration before which the wing of imagination 
grows weary, in the effort to realize even vaguely how 
vast is its sweep. It is evident that this changed scale 
of the physical universe must suggest to the reason of 
man an analogous change in our view of the origin, 
nature and destiny of man and the methods of God's 
government. 

Can we still hold man to be the aim and end of 
creation ? Can we still think, many to-day are asking, 
that the earth and heavens were fitted up specially for 
his abode? that the animal world was made just 
for his food, and the trees to shade his head from the 
heat ? the sun to warm him by day and the moon and 
stars to supply light to his path by night ? 

Is man not shown, by this immense magnitude of 
the universe, to be but a most ephemeral and infini- 
tesimal insect, the spawn of the primeval slime, a 
creature altogether too insignificant to be supposed 
to have been specially created or specially cared for ? 
What else but fables of man's credulous childhood are 
those faiths that held man to be a child of God, made 
in the divine image, or that he has been the recipient 
of divine revelations, and that the Son of God left 
His place by God's right hand, and choosing out 
of all the million solar and planetary systems in space 
this most insignificant speck, called earth, was here 
incarnated in a human form, to supply salvation by 
His blood to those who should enter the church He 
should found? Science, with its searching instru- 
ments, has investigated earth and heaven. No tele- 
scope has caught sight in the remotest recesses of 
any Titan king seated on a celestial throne ; no mi- 



14 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

croscope has observed any soul within the tissues of 
the brain ; no mining shaft has found a limbo of de- 
parted spirits beneath the earth's crust. The fires are 
there, but no trace of any imps or devils or ghostly 
shades. Dust to dust is the law of life. We begin as 
a chemical composition ; we end, when the machinery 
runs down, as a chemical decomposition. When 
thousands of worlds are burning out into lifeless 
cinders, by inevitable laws of the dissipation of energy 
and the cooling down of every warmer sphere to the 
average temperature or, we should better say, refrig- 
eration, of the interstellar space, some 200 degrees, 
as it is, below zero, why should we fancy this 
petty biped of a man should escape the general 
death ? 

Such are the questions and dilemmas, sometimes 
put in very scoffing tones, that in the minds of a 
large and growing class among us are daily arising, 
and daily alienating them more and more from the 
older views of man's origin, nature and destiny. 

On the other hand, the champions of the older faith 
maintain that in spite of this immense expansion of 
the universe we may still look on man as the chief 
subject of divine care and our earth as the moral and 
spiritual centre of the universe. The rank and prac- 
tical importance of God's creatures, or the orbs He 
has made, do not depend, they urge, on their phys- 
ical bigness or littleness, but on higher qualities. 
Though the telescope and the magnitudes it has dis- 
closed dwarf man to a petty insect, the' microscope 
gives back to man his dignity. To the Almighty and 
Eternal a thousand years are as one day, a day as is a 



TEE EXPANSION OF THE UNIVERSE 15 

thousand years, a world like Sirius as a drop of dew, 
and a drop of dew as a starry constellation. Small as 
man is, he has within him a knowledge, reason, will, 
consciousness and creative power that put him in a 
higher realm than any mass, however huge, of insen- 
sate matter. No globe of brute matter has its reason 
of existence in itself. The reason of being in all 
material things lies outside them, in their serviceable- 
ness to the spiritual universe. That which redeems 
sun, moon and stars from insignificance is simply that 
they beautify and illuminate the planet in which man 
dwells. We may even question whether these huge 
bubbles of matter have any real, independent ex- 
istence ? Many of the ablest philosophers have held 
that our very idea of space and time is relative, an 
extract and product of our conscious experience, and 
need not imply any outward reality. These solid- 
seeming globes and all their material phenomena are 
but transitory shows. They are either subjective 
illusions or shadow pictures of the divine will, pro- 
jected on to the screen of space, to serve as a theatre 
for the training of souls and the chastening of man's 
ambition ; or perhaps as mockeries and humiliations, 
to punish the presumptuous reason of the skeptical 
scientists. 

A theologian of the early part of this century, when 
the discoveries of geology first threatened the his- 
torical accuracy of Genesis, had the boldness and 
keenness to explain the fossils in the depths of the 
earth, that seemed to prove that death entered the 
world before Adam was created, as having been 
stirred into the fluent substance of the earth on the 



16 THE NEW WORLD AND TEE NEW THOUGHT 

creation-day, just to puzzle and discomfit the vain- 
glorious geologist. " Who can prove," it may sim- 
ilarly be asked, "that all these double stars and 
nebulae and apparent magnitudes of the skies that the 
conceited astronomers use as arguments to undermine 
the credibility of the first three chapters of Genesis, 
are not similar divine mockeries and judgments on the 
too prying curiosity and overconfident reason of 
modern man ? " Who knows but that, when God has 
given man his appointed probation on this planet, this 
theatre of earth and this phantasmal scenery of the 
skies will roll together like a scroll and vanish, leaving 
only, to survive the wreck of matter and the crush 
of worlds, the indestructible realm of the spiritual 
world and such souls as have accepted God's plan of 
salvation ? 

With such answering questions and assumptions are 
all inferences from the modern change of front of the 
universe, that would cast doubt on the validity of the 
older theologic systems and man's unique importance 
in the universe, often calmly waved aside. 

Which then of these antagonistic groups of in- 
ferences, drawn from the notable widening of modern 
thought, may we the more reasonably accept ? 

There is a certain measure of truth in each of them. 
On the one hand, the radical view of modern material- 
ists as to the transitoriness and insignificance of hu- 
manity in our magnified universe, and the atheistic 
inferences supposed to be demanded by the march of 
modern science, are altogether too extreme. 

If the whole universe be nothing but forms of matter 
and its motions and functions, then it matters not how 



THE EXPANSION OF THE UNIVERSE 17 

immense it is. A million million miles of it are as 
meaningless and empty as a single cubic yard. If the 
human soul have a real existence and superior nature, 
then the intrinsic rank and capacities of the human 
reason and conscience remain the same, no matter 
how many thousand times the area of the stage on 
which it plays its parts be stretched out. 

One high intuition of eternal truth, one holy impulse 
of consecration or noble moral choice, is grander than 
a whole world of clay, more magnificent than the most 
colossal galaxy of gas and dust. Intricate as are the 
mechanics of nature and stupendous as is its bulk, the 
vision of reason comprehends the most complex 
system. But mechanical nature, on the other hand, 
is not aware of its own marvels and quite unconscious 
of its triumphs. The astronomic world has not ex- 
panded faster and cannot expand faster than man's 
mind dilates to embrace it in his thought and reduce 
it to order. What we lose in relative importance 
because of the enlargement of the boundaries of the 
universe, we recover from the new revelation of man's 
amazing capacities that is given through these trans- 
cendent achievements of human science. 

The materialist would have us bow our head in de- 
spair because Sun and Sirius and the system of the 
Pleiades are so gigantic. But when we remember 
that it is " the mind of man that has measured them 
as with a surveyor's chain and weighed them as if he 
held them in his hand," is there not in this sweep and 
mystery of the human intellect something too provo- 
cative of awe and reverence to be repressed by any 
lumps of earth however mammoth in size ? It may 



18 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

be that when, through the telescope of science, we 
look up at the sky, our human stature seems to shrivel 
in the most alarming fashion. Yet, when, under the 
optician's guidance, we look at the realms below us, 
to what giant size do the dimensions of the human 
frame again expand ! If the nebulae of the astrono- 
mer belittle man, the bacteria and the atoms of the 
microscopist equally magnify him. A cubic inch of 
Bilin slate contains over a billion of millions of in- 
fusorial shells, whose characteristics are still distinct 
enough for scientific identification. Compared with 
one of these diminutive creatures, man's bulk is as 
large, proportionately, as a stellar system is, measured 
against man's stature; and each corpuscle that re- 
volves in a drop of blood within our veins may be a 
planetary system of spheres to which the human 
frame may be as colossal a galaxy as the Milky Way 
appears to our astronomers. When we think of the 
exquisite structure of these infinitesimal creatures and 
the admirable adjustment of their organs and func- 
tions to the needs of their life, (an adaptation which is 
as perfect in a bacillus or vibrio as in a whale), may we 
not believe that the power that provides so generously 
for the million inhabitants of a drop of water will much 
more take care for man, no matter how huge the con- 
stellations may be, under the charge of His infinite 
wisdom? 

Science has not diminished but multiplied the 
proofs of the intelligibility and rationality of the uni- 
verse. It has made plainer than ever the fundamental 
likeness of the finite spirit that reads the great stone- 
book and the starry hieroglyphics, with the Infinite 



THE EXPANSION OF TEE UNIVERSE 19 

Spirit that has woven with such intelligence and be- 
neficence this marvelous web of matter and force. 

If the expansion of the universe and the immu- 
table reign of cause and effect through it all have un- 
dermined the old argument from design, based on 
the adaptation of special organs to special requirements 
or conditions, it has given, instead of this " design by 
retail," a " design by wholesale " far more majestic. 
It has presented us with an all-embracing system of 
planful reason and self-adjusting development which 
demands for its inception and maintenance nothing 
less than the constant life and intelligence of an 
Omnipresent spirit. Modern science itself still puts 
man at the head of the kingdom of life ; it holds him to 
be the climax of the ascending evolution, apparently 
its end and goal. When we look back on the long 
ages through which the divine hand, by patient proc- 
ess of evolution, was preparing for man's appearance, 
and slowly moulding him in the womb of nature, till 
at length the great work received its crown in the 
emergence of the self-conscious mind, able and will- 
ing to join hands and hasten onward, with unprec- 
edented rapidity, the evolutionary processes, lifting 
them to higher levels of moral and spiritual unfolding 
than physical nature knows, does not man, then, as- 
sume a higher dignity ? Does it not seem more prob- 
able than ever before that his Creator did not delve 
and model in the clay-pits of life for so many long 
ages merely to complete a marvelous automaton, that 
he would send back to inanimate dust with the 
stoppage of his pulse and thus render vain all the long 
travail of the aeons ? 



20 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

If it be the great law of science that the fittest 
survive, that no atom passes into nothing, but only 
passes on to new forms and fields of activity, what 
else in all the ascending ranks of life is the best and 
fittest to survive, if not this truth-seeking mind, this 
conscience, reverent of the right, this soul-personality 
which knows itself an inseparable unity, an integer 
more indivisible than any atom, the centre in which 
all reasoning, memory, comparison and judgment sub- 
sist and by which alone they are possible ? Without 
a continuance in existence of this conscious spirit 
which is the most consummate flower and essence of 
the universe, that universe itself becomes a meaning- 
less chaos and ephemeral force. 

The materialistic inferences which have sometimes 
been drawn from the grand enlargement of the world, 
effected by modern thought, are not, then, either 
necessary or credible. The expansion of the universe 
has no endorsement to give to these melancholy theories 
or that contempt for humanity which they would foster. 

While this is true, there are, on the other hand, 
very important changes demanded by the recognition 
of our magnified universe. In the new light supplied 
by modern scientific discoveries it is impossible that 
our theological conceptions should remain unchanged. 
These discoveries require us to modify very consider- 
ably the views of God's government and the nature, 
origin and destiny of man, that were held of old in 
the larger churches. It is true, of course, that to the 
divine eye our ideas of small and great, of the mo- 
mentary and the permanent, may be interchangeable. 
Nevertheless, this does not dismiss the notions of time 



THE EXPANSION OF THE UNIVERSE 21 

and space as mere subjective illusions which we need 
not regard. 

Whatever be the standard of measurement, large or 
small, there is that relative position and contiguity 
and varied direction that constitutes space ; there is 
that inescapable fact of a before and an after in con- 
scious experience or successive motions, that con- 
stitutes the essence of time. And the comparative 
magnitudes and durations of these conditions of space 
and time are not to be ignored in any reasonable in- 
terpretation of the laws of the universe and man's re- 
lations to the divine government. 

Especially should it be remembered that neither 
these vast spaces nor far prolonged periods that modern 
science has disclosed are empty things. This is the 
correlative discovery of science everywhere accom- 
panying every extension of the universe, viz. : that this 
universe teems with energy and change. 

Another thing is equally to be borne in mind — that 
all these changes are orderly and harmonious. The 
laws of the transmutation of species, established by 
Darwin and Wallace, show the unity of life. The 
revelations of the spectroscope and the majestic laws 
of the correlation of force that Grove and Joule es- 
tablished, proving that light, heat and magnetism are 
all variants of one another and manifestations of a 
common force behind them, all show an essential 
Unity, running as a scarlet web through the universe. 
All these systems of suns are under one constitution, 
and the luminous matter in all is substantially the 
same. One ether extends through all as the medium 
of communication. One gravitation guides all in their 



22 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

orbits. One law of birth and growth and heredity- 
pushes the kingdom of life steadily upward. One 
process of organization, continuous and alike, rules 
every galaxy and every atom. From the diffused to 
the compacted, from the lifeless to the living, from the 
nebula to the man, from lower to higher — such is the 
eternal rhythm of the cosmic evolution. 

Here in these words, the cosmic evolution, we have 
named the mightiest change which science has made 
in the last half-century. From the moment Galileo's 
opera glasses showed the phases of Venus this law 
was sure to be reached sooner or later. It was from 
that day a predestined thing that the current belief of 
Christendom of 200 years ago, in which our earth was 
regarded as a scene of decay and moral fall and con- 
stant supernatural intervention, should suffer change. 
It seems almost superfluous to recall how every birth 
or death, every comet or earthquake, every unusual 
event, was regarded as occurring by the special inter- 
vention of some supernatural agent, magician or saint, 
imp or angel, devil or god, according to the respective 
smallness or bigness, badness or goodness, of the 
event. All this has been ejected by science from the 
belief of enlightened men and women. Everywhere 
law is found to reign. Lily and solar system are found 
to unfold according to one and the same grand system. 
The hallucinations of the senses, even the insane de- 
lusions, are found to have their natural sources. 

The world to-day is indeed found fuller than ever 
of marvels ; but now here can anything be credited as 
occurring in violation of law. No miracle, in the 
sense of an interruption of the universal order to 



TEE EXPANSION OF THE UNIVERSE 23 

benefit some favorite among the sons of men, is 
longer credited. The only miracles that even religion 
to-day should know are those wonders, manifold and 
mysterious enough, that present unusual examples of 
subtler and deeper laws than we have as yet acquainted 
ourselves with. The greatest of miracles to every 
thoughtful mind is that God's forethought and uni- 
versal plans have been so perfect, from the first day 
that the morning stars sang together, that no subse- 
quent interference has been needed to rectify any de- 
fects. The astonishing freaks of power or super- 
natural signs of a celestial mission, of which the older 
theology made so much, have therefore lost credence, 
and all the witches, imps and devils of the olden time 
have vanished before this confidence in nature's un- 
changing orderliness, like the shadows of a hideous 
night. 

When there is no longer any up or down, nor cav- 
ernous abode of shades beneath the earth, and when 
the azure dome of crystal, above which God held His 
court, has been dissipated into interstellar ether, such 
wonders as the descent of Christ into hell or His as- 
cent to heaven to sit on God's right hand have had to 
be turned into allegories, even if they do stand in the 
Apostles' creed. As man has been found to be not 
the victim of a fall, the ruin of a once perfect being, 
but an ascending spirit, " slowly climbing with the 
climbing world" out of early animality to his des- 
tined inheritance as a child of God, so the old doc- 
trines of total depravity and the need of a vicarious 
atoner to pay for the sin of man's federal head, Adam, 
have passed away. The perfect man in our modern 



&4 THfi NEW WORLD AND TBE NEW tHOTJGET 

thought is not behind us but before us. The theologic 
scheme, by which God the Father sacrificed His only- 
begotten Son to snatch mankind out of the clutches 
of Satan on one of the myriad specks that dot the 
celestial ocean of space, appears, in the light of the 
modern expansion of the universe, as the most obvious 
relic of the infancy of thought. It is a conception of the 
world, long ago outgrown. 

Humanity has had not merely one Saviour, but a 
thousand, each doing his part, great or small, in re- 
generating mankind. God did more than incarnate 
Himself in Jesus. He has incarnated Himself in all 
humanity in proportion to the spiritual receptivity of 
each; and every true and disinterested soul, every 
martyr for truth and justice who has surrendered his 
life to uplift the world or ease a brother's woe, has had 
his glorious participation in that red blood of sacrifice 
that slowly redeems our race from its ancient sins and 
inveterate diseases. 

The beginning of the soul on earth and its exit and 
future career must take place by general law. The 
origin of the soul will henceforth be conceived less as 
a special creation than as a creative specialization of 
the universal life, an individualization of the indwelling 
divine Spirit in a personal form and consciousness. 
The immortality of the soul, if it is to be credited in 
the twentieth century, must no longer be represented 
as a miraculous gift to a few elect individuals, a super- 
natural regathering and reanimation of bodily sub- 
stances and atoms, long since scattered but flying 
together at the sound of a trumpet. On the contrary, 
it must be regarded as a universal and regular process, 



THE EXPANSION OF TEE UNIVERSE 25 

the natural release, at the time of the body's decay, 
of a soul too vital, too unitary and too subtle to be 
involved in the dissolution of its clayey tabernacle. 
Immortality must be found to be a process in strict 
harmony with a rational universe, the only rational 
outcome of the universe as it unfolds to its higher 
consummation. If man's soul is immortal, its salva- 
tion must be under universal laws, not a thing due to 
the accident of birth in a Christian nation or the visit 
of some missionary with a Bible or the presence of a 
priest with drops of holy water. The doors of possi- 
ble immortality must be as wide open in China or Ja- 
pan as in New York or London, — nay, as wide open 
in Mars or any of the satellites of Sirius, if conscious 
life has yet evolved on any of these bodies, as it was 
in the streets of Jerusalem in the first century of our 
era. When we think of the millions of globes, where 
the same laws of evolution are going on and have 
gone on for aeons as here, can we credit it that it is 
to our own little planet that the saving mercy of God 
has been confined ? Not alone to our earth and in 
the flesh of its humanity has the love of God been 
manifested and incarnated, but also, I like to think, to 
every part of the cosmos where souls have come to 
need it, in every abode of planetary and stellar so- 
ciety. As evil is no longer to be thought due to the 
malign influence of an apple-bite, or the weakness of 
a woman, but as an incident of that government by 
fixed law and that option of free-will that everywhere 
prevails in the universe, so every embodied life of the 
soul is a training in spiritual strength and upbuilding 
to the fuller character of a mature moral nature. 



26 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEV/ THOUGHT 

" The divine judgment is not a cleaving asunder 
of the blue dome for the descent of angelic squadrons, 
headed by the majestic Son of God, the angry breath 
of His mouth consuming the wicked/' as theologians 
have pictured it ; it is no spectacular drama of retri- 
bution, winding up the scroll of the ages with sudden 
afterclap of retribution ; but it is the constant self- 
working of an inherent law, assimilating us more and 
more to that infernal or celestial love to which we 
have given our hearts. 

All the punishments of the soul are means of dis- 
cipline and growth ; all its heavenly promotions are 
rewards of spiritual desert and fitness. Death is but 
an incident and a necessary incident of the onward 
progress of the spirit. So, also, the conception of the 
departed soul as being conducted and shut up in cer- 
tain localities, above or below, in heavenly courts or 
infernal pits, seems a relic of this older geocentric 
view of the universe, which no mind familiar with the 
heliocentric structure of the heavens can very well 
hold. Modern thought conceives of the disembodied 
soul, rather, as possessed of the freedom of the uni- 
verse, and carrying its own heaven and hell within its 
happy or remorseful consciousness. 

In the soul's life after death, as before death, its 
natural course is a continued ascent. We enter the 
spirit world, the wisest of us, as mere infants in spir- 
itual power, to go onward, by varied experiences, 
perhaps through many rebirths, to the youth and full 
maturity of spiritual character. The infinity of worlds 
and the measureless eternities of time and varied con- 
ditions of existence, that modern knowledge exhibits, 



THE EXPANSION OF THE UNIVERSE 27 

seem to me to harmonize little with the popular 
notion that this earthly life is the only probation time 
of the human soul. The enormity and disproportion 
of the penalty for him who fails to meet the require- 
ments of the current scheme of salvation seem too 
great to be credible. The wisest of men are but little 
children, the longest earthly life a mere tick of the 
pendulum of eternity. The aeons of that eternity 
belong to a Father who rejoiceth more over one sin- 
ner that repenteth than over ninety-and-nine that have 
never gone astray ; and I fondly dream that He will 
try, through failure after failure and effort after effort, 
to crown with success every case of soul-training He 
has ever begun ; and His almighty power and unceas- 
ing love will not in the end be defeated by the crea- 
ture He has made. Each soul that begins to live 
enters on a pilgrimage whose length can be measured 
by no clock but that of eternity. Divine spark, as the 
human spirit is, proceeding from the bosom of the 
Divine, there is none so degraded that, in the course 
of time, in the endless opportunities of the future, 
he cannot rise to the level of his heavenly destiny. 
" I do not care," as a friend of mine has said, " if 
it takes several solar systems to do it. The soul can 
wear out solar systems as we wear out coats." 

The whole universe is God's home, and the vastest 
constellations but a corner or two in the many man- 
sions of the hospitable and everlasting sanctuary. 
Everywhere, through its unending aisles, the Divine 
Life pulses and the unswerving Love cares for all 
His children. Steadily upward and onward they are 
conducted, by salutary experiences, from room to 



28 THE NEW WORLD AND TEE NEW THOUGHT 

room, from realm to realm; and these huge spaces 
and dots of flame and molten or out-burned balls of 
fire that, to the materialist, seem such a dreary and 
meaningless tomb, are, to the eye of faith, a grand 
and systematic university of souls, class above class 
and hall enclosing hall — all its courts bright with 
growing revelations, fragrant with unwearying love 
and tremulous with the breath and sympathy of the 
omnipresent, indwelling God. 

It has been charged that the reconstructions which 
modern inquiry have made diminish reverence, foster 
skepticism and are inimical to religion. But for faith 
to be panic-struck because this earth of ours has 
shriveled to the minuteness of a mustard seed is a 
most unreasonable alarm. So much more glorious this 
cosmic Igdrasil, on whose stem of life this mustard seed 
is borne aloft ! So much more adorable the Divine 
Fulness that spread out these teeming fields, whose 
centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere ! 

Yes, immensely more glorious ; unless, forsooth, you 
fancy these titan dimensions and myriad processes too 
great a task for any mind or personality, even that 
of the Infinite, to direct or order. " How, then," as 
Martineau asks, " has your mind, as learner, managed 
to measure and know it, at least enough to think it to 
be something beyond thought ? " 

And if it is too great a task for conscious mind — 
the highest faculty we know, — too great even for a 
mind of divine compass to order and superintend it, 
then how much more is it beyond the possibilities of 
anything else to account for that wonderful harmony 
which the cosmos so plainly exhibits ! 



THE EXPANSION OF THE UNIVERSE 29 

The fact is that these reconstructions of modern 
science do not touch the substance of religion. They 
only shift its forms and really enlarge its sway and 
dignity. Put the case we have been discussing 
squarely before any intelligent Christian, so that he 
can see its full significance, and who would prefer to 
go back to the cosmic baby-house of Cosmas Indi- 
copleustes and Thomas Aquinas ? Who would vault 
in again the immensity of space to restore Dante's 
little heaven ? Who would cut down to six ordinary 
evenings and mornings the activity of Him who in- 
habiteth eternity and has been forever at His work of 
evolution ? Who would relinquish the confidence and 
hope inspired by the unswerving progress of that 
single divine purpose that links the ages together ? 

For, whatever science has wrenched from the hand 
of faith, she has given her back triple and quadruple 
gifts. The vigorous probing that science has brought 
to nature has not removed any of its wonderfulness, 
any of its perfections, has not in any way robbed 
man of his highest hopes or lessened his dignity ; but 
it has disclosed new marvels behind those that first 
struck man's attention ; it has made the universe more 
august and yet more homelike. It has not emptied 
the world of spiritual force, but filled it with the 
presence of one All-inclusive Wisdom, one Infinite 
Power and Eternal Love, from the firm yet tender 
embrace of whose perfect order we can never fall. 

" That God which ever lives and loves, 
One God, one law, one element, 
And one far-off divine event, 
To which the whole creation moves." 



CHAPTER II. 

THE SANCTION FOR MORALITY IN NATURE. 

The old proverb calls it " an ill wind that blows 
nobody good." Conversely, there are few good winds 
that do not, at first, or in certain ways, blow ill to 
somebody. Every fertilizing shower interrupts some 
one's promenade, or spoils somebody's hat. Every 
new and better road pulls down somebody's fence. 
So the reconstruction of thought and faith which the 
progress of modern knowledge has made, beneficent 
as it has been, has caused great perplexity to many 
minds, and set not a few quite adrift on a shoreless 
sea of doubt. In the turmoil of opinions not only 
hollow traditions and baseless credulities have been 
assailed, but also the most legitimate authorities. Those 
naturally skeptical or iconoclastic, use the new dis- 
coveries as clubs to batter down the best established 
principles of morality and religion. A conspicuous 
recent sufferer from this tendency is the great law of 
Evolution, which the labors of Darwin and Spencer, 
Wallace and Romanes have so strongly confirmed. 

The four great facts on which the law of evolution 
rests are very simple. Living creatures, in the first 
place, multiply so fast that there would be neither 
food nor room for more than a small part, were all to 
survive. Secondly, every living thing born into the 
world varies slightly from every other. Thirdly, all 
30 



THE SANCTION FOR MORALITY IN NATURE 31 

living beings inherit, more or less, the peculiarities of 
their parents. In the fourth place, the selection of 
those that survive is determined by their fitness to 
meet the struggle for existence, or to please their 
mates. These four facts appear, to scientific minds, 
no less evident and elementary than innocent in their 
bearings and august in their monitions. 

But when the popular mind, hearing that these are 
now accepted truths of modern knowledge, begins to 
handle and apply them to daily life, what are its 
practical deductions ? To our surprise we find it in- 
ferred that evolution is a process where merciless com- 
petition and cruelty are the honored rule, that nature 
is a field where every creature struggles, and must 
struggle, for himself alone; that, therefore, such 
struggle is properly the rule to-day ; that might is the 
only right which nature knows, and that the weak go 
to the wall, wljere they had better go. 

It is not the ignorant only who adopt these con- 
clusions, but also learned savants who have been 
prominent advocates of the evolution theory. One 
of its American champions, Mr. Van Buren Denslow, 
some years ago, rebuking Mr. Spencer for not carry- 
ing out to its logical result the teachings of the 
doctrine of development, maintained that moral rules 
are merely " doctrines established by the strong for 
the government of the weak. The prompting to steal 
and lie is as much a prompting of nature with the 
weak, as the commandments prohibiting those acts 
are naturally urged on the weak by the stronger ones, 
who wish to keep the weak in subjection." 

Similarly, the German philosopher, Nietzsche, in his 



32 TEE NEW WORLD AND TEE NEW TEOUGET 

"Zur Genealogie der Moral," traces the genesis of 
present morality in the following manner : At the 
beginning of civilization, " a herd of blond beasts of 
prey, free from every social restraint, ranged about, 
exulting in murder, rapine, torture, and incendiarism, 
and made slaves of the lower races." Their own 
qualities, cruelty, pride, joy in danger, and extreme 
unscrupulousness (to-day reckoned bad qualities) — 
were then the good qualities. Their slaves and sub- 
jects naturally abhorred these qualities of their op- 
pressors, and gave the place of honor to those qualities 
that ameliorated their own sufferings, — pity, self- 
sacrifice, patience, diligence, and friendliness. When, 
at length, this slave-morality, through the victory of 
Christianity and democracy, got the upper hand, the 
primitive morality was inverted ; the naturally bad 
qualities were regarded as good, and the native in- 
stincts of man that incite to selfishness and cruelty 
were condemned as evil. Although Nietzsche's theory 
of the origin of the virtues is quite opposite to that of 
Mr. Denslow, he agrees with him in considering morals 
not as universal laws, but as the edicts and utilities of 
a class. 

Equally surprising, were the declarations of 
Professor Huxley in his last volume of collected 
essays, " Evolution and Ethics," in which his 
singular Romanes Lecture was still further cham- 
pioned and given a permanent place among his 
works. After painting in the blackest of colors the 
injustice of the world, and roundly scoring the un- 
moral character of the cosmic order, he appeals to the 
logic of facts as proving that " the cosmos works 



TEE SANCTION FOR MORALITY IN NATURE 33 

through the lower nature of man, not for righteous- 
ness, but against it." With especial severity he criti- 
cises the fallacies, as he would brand them, of evo- 
lution. As the unmoral sentiments have been evolved, 
no less than the moral, " there is, so far, as much 
natural sanction for the one as for the other." " The 
thief and the murderer," he bluntly says, " follow 
nature as much as the philanthropist." Cosmic evo- 
lution is " incompetent to furnish any better reason 
why what we call good is preferable to what we call 
evil than we had before." Professor Huxley contends 
that " for man's successful progress as far as the savage 
state, he has been largely indebted to those qualities 
which he shares with the ape and the tiger." But 
with the changed conditions of man's later life, these 
serviceable qualities of the earlier time have become 
defects. " Civilized man would gladly kick down the 
ladder by which he has climbed. In fact, civilized 
man brands all these ape and tiger promptings with 
the name of sins. He punishes many of the acts 
which flow from them as crimes, and in extreme cases 
he does his best to put an end to the survival of the 
fittest of former days by axe and rope." " The cosmic 
progress has no sort of relation to moral ends." " The 
imitation of it by man is inconsistent with the first 
principles of ethics." 

The ethical progress of society to-day, Professor 
Huxley concludes, " depends not on imitating the 
cosmic progress, still less in running away from it, 
but in combating it." The microcosm should pit 
itself against the macrocosm, and " social progress 
means a checking of the cosmic progress at every step 



34 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

and the substitution for it of another which may be 
called the ethical progress/' 

Such, in substance, is the string of pyrotechnical 
paradoxes through which the eminent English Evo- 
lutionist gave the scientific and philosophic world 
as lively a shock as it has for a long time experi- 
enced. 

Have nature and evolution, then, no sanction for 
morality? What are we to think of these modern 
Jeremiads of certain evolutionists, which seem to come, 
now from the lips of a resurrected Schopenhauer, now 
from those of a third century Manichsean, and which 
have made all the old-time dualists and supernaturalists 
ask with wondering glee, " Is Saul, also, among the 
prophets ? " 

The question has very important bearings. For, 
if morals and nature be in antagonism ; if evolution be 
a process whose law is selfishness and cruelty, or at 
least without sanction for righteousness and helpful- 
ness, then, both the cause of evolution and that of 
rational ethics are weighted with grave objections ; 
and advanced science joins its voice with ancient 
dogmatism in declaring the world a realm divided 
against itself. 

If, on the other hand, we can find our ethical 
instincts rooted in the whole realm of vital nature, and 
developed step by step with the ascent of life, then 
science and faith will be harmonized, and we shall see 
that the fundamental verities and duties are right, not 
simply because revelation or intuition has taught 
them, but that they have been taught because the ex- 
perience of the world has shown them to be right, 



THE SANCTION FOR MORALITY IN NATURE 35 

and the irresistible instincts of our vital being proclaim 
them afresh in every succeeding generation. 

Professor Huxley and the other critics who would 
stigmatize evolution as a cruel and selfish process, and 
who like to describe the world as a vast battle-field, 
where the carnage goes on without cessation, and the 
weak are systematically left at the mercy of the strong, 
make the error of bisecting nature. They drop out 
of view the better and larger half of it, the end and 
consummation of the process, and then condemn the 
whole because of their own partial observation. They 
are like a man who should cut an apple-tree in two at 
the trunk, and then blame the roots because they bore 
no fruit. The process of evolution should be judged, 
not by its roots, by what appears in its lower, rudi- 
mentary forms and crude beginnings, but by its whole 
sweep and final outcome. It is the mature form, most 
of all, that presents the characteristic genius of plant 
and animal. The real nature of an oak-tree is not 
best discerned in the folded cotyledons, or the initial 
swellings of the acorn, or the rootlets that first push 
out from the shell. Acorn and rootlets are but parts 
and expressions of that evolutive potentiality, that 
generic idea, which is only to be completely under- 
stood when we gaze at the full-grown monarch of the 
forest. 

So, to discern the real character of the cosmic evo- 
lution and the authentic teachings of nature, we 
should not separate the inorganic realm from the 
organic, nor the animal from the human plane of 
development, nor hold up the brutal warfare of the 
carnivora and the ravin and ruin of the competing 



36 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

rivals of the Saurian ages as exemplifications of 
nature's character and lessons. We must recognize 
the animal and the human species as parts of one 
divine system, the end and fruit of which are even 
more significant than its crude beginnings. In the 
highest moral and spiritual forms and forces attained 
in the process of evolution, we should recognize the 
ampler and clearer manifestations of that vital spirit 
and divine power which works and unfolds itself 
through all the varied levels of creation. If civiliza- 
tion and science and human morality really constitute 
an " artificial world," as Professor Huxley asks us to 
believe, " antagonistic to the general constitution of 
the universe," how can we look for anything but 
defeat when the microcosm pits itself against the 
macrocosm ? How, indeed, could the higher life of 
humanity ever have won a victory or reached the ele- 
vation that it has attained ? 

The contrary position is evident. Precisely because 
human science and morality have been in harmony 
and alliance with the secret laws and higher forces of 
the universe, they have made the progress that we 
know. 

The term nature, properly used, means the whole 
of creation, not its lower half; and the great victory 
of modern science has been precisely to show that 
man is as much a part of nature and under nature's 
laws as the vegetable or the animal kingdom. If 
humanity and human life are not a part of nature, 
then the laborious researches and boasted achieve- 
ments of Darwin, Spencer, and Romanes have gone 
for naught. If humanity and human life, on the other 



THE SANCTION FOB MORALITY IN NATUEE 37 

hand, are constituent parts of nature, nature's teach- 
ings are to be found, not simply in the fiery volcano or 
the devouring leopard, but also in the generous hand 
that rescues from danger, and the pitying care that 
binds and heals the sufferer's wounds. Animal evo- 
lution culminates in human evolution, and human 
evolution culminates in the unfolding and perfection 
of the spiritual nature. As the end and fruit is indis- 
putably moral, by what logic shall we declare that the 
process and law are devoid of ethical import ? 

In the next place it is worthy of notice, and a most 
proper plea in mitigation of the charges made, that those 
parts and actions in nature, which are most criticised as 
evil, are never ends in themselves, but merely means 
and intermediate steps to the goal of good. This fierce 
competition in the multitude of living beings ; this de- 
vouring of insect by bird and mouse, and destruction of 
bird and mouse by cat and hawk, and the wiping out 
of the species unfitted to maintain themselves in the 
painful struggle, — each of these processes is useful to 
the higher ends towards which the current of life 
moves. It is this that fills each nook with life, makes 
the mole conquer the underworld of the ground and 
the bird the realm of air, and makes each living 
species strive and develop itself to the utmost. It is 
this that sharpens the eyes of the lynx and the hear- 
ing of the deer, and gives swiftness to the antelope and 
the horse. It is this that moulds dull sensation into 
these varied and marvelous instincts of bee and moth, 
and, as the struggle goes on, leads rigid instinct up to 
flexile cunning and adaptive intelligence ; and, among 
the higher animals, develops in each race, according 



38 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEVf THOUGHT 

to its peculiar dangers or opportunities, emotions of 
fidelity or sympathy, faculties of memory or attention, 
of song or reason ; and in man, at length, constitutes 
mind and conscience the controlling powers, and 
makes success in the battle of life the prize of courage, 
perseverance, mutual devotion, and self-sacrifice. Al- 
though on the lower levels the stern law of natural 
selection produces the grasping parasite and the vo- 
racious reptile, and in the early stages gives the ad- 
vantage to the hard and selfish, yet, as the evolution 
continues, this very" Moloch of natural selection/' as it 
has been called, refines and elevates its products age 
by age. It annihilates the ferocious monsters of the 
reptilian age ; it reduces the barnacle to immobility; it 
makes the slave-holding ant helpless and the human 
slave owner a fossil of the past. It breeds out of the 
ferocious wolf-tribe the affectionate and devoted dog, 
and allows no people to survive unless that people 
makes justice and neighborly assistance and good-will 
the recognized laws of its national life. Each layer of 
olden slime and blood is a fertilizing alluvium which 
produces the later glory of spiritual blossom and of 
righteous, kindly fruit. 

Moreover, a closer study of nature shows even more 
than this. It shows that, even in the lower and rudi- 
mentary stages of life, there is an altruism contem- 
poraneous with the egoism of evolution. There is 
" a struggle for others," as Professor Drummond has 
well phrased it, conjoined with the struggle for self, 
constantly restraining selfishness, often dominant over 
it even in low ranks of life, and in the larger and higher 
families of the natural kingdom always preponderant. 



JHE SANCTION FOR MORALITY IN NATURE 39 

A superficial acquaintance with the facts of evolu- 
tion brings out as its prominent features such traits as 
struggle, selfishness and cruelty. But a deeper and 
keener study shows that from the outset of life there 
have been principles of super-fecundity and overflow 
present, and there have been instincts of solidarity 
and sympathy involved that irresistibly carry the 
individual beyond the circle of his own interests. 
In the simplest cell which, in obedience to the 
expansive tendency of life, splits into two, or 
forms, with its excess of protoplasm, the nucleus 
of a new cell, the philosophic eye beholds the 
germ of the moral law and the promise of the beati- 
tudes. Wherever vitality is at its best, it is character- 
ized by a constant overplus of production beyond the 
needs of self-maintenance, and therefore an overflow 
of the fountain of being that carries its current beyond 
the bounds of self and commingles the waters of life. 
Altruistic giving is the inseparable correlate of this 
vital over-production. A certain disinterestedness and 
outgoing of largess and sympathy is as characteristic of 
healthy life as for the mother of a new-born babe to give 
her milk to the babe. In the sacred unity and natural 
bond that keeps the ocean in its bed and holds the parent 
sheep to the duty of suckling her helpless lambkin, we 
see the germ of that moral necessity that blossoms in 
a Socrates' conscience or a Christ's self-sacrifice. 

Professor Huxley presents the cosmic struggle for 
existence as demanding the opposite conduct from 
goodness and virtue: not self-restraint, but ruthless 
self-assertion, and the characteristic qualities of ape 
and tiger. By this he must mean, if his argument is 



40 THE NEW WOULD AND TEE NEW THOUGHT 

to be effective, such qualities as those of cruelty, 
voracity, thievery, and wantonness. On the contrary, 
even the tiger's survival and success demanded from 
him self-restraint and care for others. Had this self- 
assertion and devouring appetite been indeed " ruth- 
less," and not checked themselves in the presence of 
his mate and his cubs and been ready to share his 
booty with them, his line would have perished with 
the first generation. Did the apes not associate them- 
selves in bands, combining their forces for mutual as- 
sistance and defense, how could this species of crea- 
ture, so comparatively weak physically, destitute of 
tusks, fangs, horns, or armor, have sustained itself 
against its far more powerful enemies? It is not 
merely in the human species, but also throughout the 
whole realm of life below, that altruism and social 
bonds manifest themselves ; self-will at due times and 
occasions represses itself; and if it will not voluntarily 
yield and curb its excesses, then it is sternly enforced 
to do so by an inexorable Nemesis. 

Foremost among these factors that enforce co- 
operation and more or less of altruism, are those cen- 
tral facts in the animal kingdom, sex and infant weak- 
ness. Above the very lowest orders of existence, no 
animal and few of the higher plants can reproduce 
their species without a mate, nor can the young sur- 
vive without parental care. Reproduction is no less 
fundamental to life than nutrition. And if the neces- 
sity of feeding themselves is the sure producer of 
egoism in all forms of flesh and blood; the necessity 
of pleasing their mates and taking care of their young 
just as surely fosters altruism. 



THE SANCTION FOR MORALITY IN NATURE 41 

Of course we should not attribute to the animal 
mother the same affection and conscious self-denial 
that characterize a human mother. But throughout 
every realm of natural history, above the microscopic, 
there are instincts that carry the individual beyond 
his own needs, and often quite contrary to his own 
ease, comfort, and self-preservation ; because they are 
demanded by the race. The universal conditions of 
reproduction, are, first, giving ; and, next, self-sacrifice. 
See, in the case of the flowers, how the anther gives 
to the stigma the fertilizing pollen that through micro- 
scopic gateways penetrates to the inmost heart of the 
pistil ; how, with the first beginning of the seed, the 
petals begin to wither, turning into the germs the sap 
on which they might have lived, and packing around 
each tiny germ the stores of starch and albumen 
jvhich shall feed their hunger when the sun calls them 
forth to life with the spring. " Every flower in the 
world," Henry Drummond well says, " lives for others. 
It sets aside something costly, a gift to the future, 
brought into the world and paid for by its own de- 
mise. Every seed, every egg, is a tithe of love." 
Paternity implies a regard for another, more or less 
permanent. Maternity is synonymous with self- 
sacrifice. 

As we look through the annals of natural history, 
what curious and even romantic details are beheld grow- 
ing from these fruitful roots ! We see the sand-wasp, 
that never beholds its offspring, nevertheless laboriously 
laying up for its grubs a provision of fresh food in a 
sealed storehouse ; the paternal pipe-fish, carrying the 
eggs of its offspring about in a pouch till they are 



42 THE NEW WOULD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

hatched ; the father-nightingale, feeding the mother 
regularly while she is sitting on the nest ; the indig- 
nant gander, valorously protecting its little brood 
against the intrusive stranger ; the mother lioness, in- 
tercepting with the shield of her own body the lance 
which threatens her cub, — what resplendent and 
touching testimonies do the annals of science furnish 
to refute the calumny that the cosmic order is one 
solely or chiefly of ruthless self-assertion ! 

No doubt, this parental love was in the beginning 
crude, narrow, and hard. Evolution had to give it 
long and patient polishing before the bitter buds, the 
dwarfish, crumpled cotyledons, became the lovely and 
stately blossoms of disinterested and unswerving af- 
fection that we admire to-day. But the important 
thing to notice is that the moral germ was there; 
something unique in its kind and divine in its possi- 
bilities. As Professor Romanes has well said : " The 
greatest of all distinctions in biology, when it first 
arises, is thus seen to be in its potentiality rather than 
in its origin. The distinction between a nature that 
can and a nature that cannot possess moral power is 
capital. ,, Once established in the world, this altruistic 
bud was sure to increase and sweeten. Loveless 
parents meant neglected, stunted dying offspring. 
But the loving father and mother saved and improved 
their offspring and made more loving descendants. 
The fostering affection, however little it matters not, 
was bound to be preserved and accumulated by that 
best of bankers, heredity, at compound interest. Each 
succeeding family in this royal line is richer in the 
dements that make for progress. The little group of 



TEE SANCTION FOR MORALITY IN NATURE 43 

father, mother, and offspring act together, and are 
stronger for their union. New forces of sympathy, 
brotherhood, and devotion spring up within the holy 
circle ; and in the family, evolution gains a new in- 
strument and ally, a daily generator and guardian of 
the social and moral forces through which human 
progress is attained. 

All these parental feelings, it may be urged, how- 
ever, are but enlargements and prolongations, so to 
speak, of self. The offspring belongs to the mother, 
and her care of it has, therefore, nothing properly dis- 
interested about it. Outside this family circle can we 
find in the system of nature any examples of mutual 
help, any instances of truly disinterested sympathy and 
cooperation ? 

Most assuredly we can. He who cannot see them, 
but perceives in the cosmic order only a gladiatorial 
pit, either has only a meagre knowledge of natural his- 
tory, or wilfully closes his eyes to its nobler chapters. 

At the daw r n of animate existence, every life was 
probably a single cell, as we still see in the case of the 
amoeba and other protozoa. But this self-sufficiency 
leads to nothing in evolution. For the development 
process to advance, it must resort to the cooperative 
principle. So we have compound plants and flowers ; 
the colonies and groups in which the lower animals 
club together their forces ; the communal life of the 
polyps, the sponges, and the bees, where each member 
or group takes up its respective share of labor for the 
public good ; one set drawing in the food, a second 
digesting it, assimilating and storing it away ; a third 
producing buds, seeds or eggs. 



44 THE NEW WORLD AND TEE NEW THOUGHT 

As we direct our glance a little higher up the ladder 
of life, we see a still more interesting case oi znutuau 
aid in those notable interchanges of good services be- 
tween blossom and insect, to which we owe all that is 
beautiful and fragrant in the floral world. In its in- 
most heart the flower spreads a banquet of honey, and 
marks the road to it with showy or conspicuous petals 
or some sweet perfume, that even at night will guide 
the insect guest to the nectar. As each bee or moth 
or butterfly helps itself from the table of its floral host, 
it pays for all it takes by carrying the fertilizing pollen 
to the neighboring flower, and ensuring the preserva- 
tion and multiplication of the species that has fed it. 
Thus plant and insect develop together. Those plants 
survive and multiply most that hide their honey and 
pollen best from hostile marauders, but leave some 
clue to guide their insect helpers. The bee and the 
moth quicken in intelligence and helpfulness, because 
those who make the most skilful go-betweens will 
best feed themselves and best propagate the plants 
that will feed their descendants. 

Even on this low range in the animate world, it is 
evident that "those creatures succeed best who, in 
fulfilling their own life, also compass the good of 
other beings." The farther and higher we pursue our 
investigation, the more numerous and striking are the 
illustrations of this reciprocity and helpfulness. The 
beetles assist each other in rolling up the pellets of 
manure in which they bury their- eggs. Many cater- 
pillars weave tents in common. Beavers'combine to 
cut down logs and build their dams and communal 
huts. Wolves, wild-dogs, and jackals do their hunting 



THE SANCTION FOR MORALITY IN NATURE 45 

in packs. Rabbits, sheep, chamois, and rooks give 
each other signals of danger. 1 Among bees, the 
neuters, who never become mothers, watch over the 
eggs and cocoons as if these were their own. The 
agricultural ants sow in common, and harvest and 
store their crops in granaries to use in common, for 
general sustenance. According to Forel, the funda- 
mental feature in the life of many species of ants is the 
obligation of every ant to share its food, already 
swallowed and digested, with every member of the 
community who may apply for it. If an ant which 
has its crop full is too selfish to regurgitate a part of 
it for the use of a hungry comrade, it will be treated 
as an enemy. 

The instances of sympathy and self-sacrificing kind- 
ness among animals are as numerous as they are in- 
teresting. Sir James Malcolm personally told Professor 
Romanes of a monkey on shipboard, who, when its 
companion monkey fell overboard, threw to it a cord, 
the other end of which was tied around its own body. 2 
Mrs. Olive Thorne Miller, in a recent lecture, told of a 
cedar-bird that she had known to take charge of a 
nest of young robins whose parents had been killed, 
and to bring up the brood of orphans with motherly 
care. Mr. Belt tells of a number of cases where he 
has seen ants that had been buried under clay or 
pebbles released by their neighbors, often with great 
labor. 3 When seals, buffaloes or deer are attacked, 
the males put the mothers and young and weak of the 

1 Darwin, Descent of Man, p. ioo. 

2 Romanes, Animal Intelligence, p. 475. 

3 Naturalist in Nicaragua, 1874, p. 26. 



46 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

herd in the least exposed place, and go to the front to 
meet the enemy. 1 

Thomas Edward, the Scotch naturalist, having 
wounded a tern, or sea-swallow, so that it could not 
fly, saw it lifted up by two unwounded comrades and 
carried out to a rock in the sea beyond his reach. 2 

The weasel, which, as Rev. J. G. Wood relates, 
came to pick up and carry away an injured comrade ; 
the rats, who led a sightless comrade by a straw ; 3 the 
blind pelican, who was fed by neighbors on fish 
brought many miles ; 4 the gander that guided his 
blind comrade about by gently taking her neck in his 
bill ; 5 the old baboon, who came down from his place 
of safety on the hill to force his way through a pack 
of dogs and carry off a young baboon that had re- 
mained behind in peril, 6 — these instances of tender 
feeling and generous deeds might be called the de- 
lightful romances of natural history, were it not that 
every one of them is a well-attested fact. They are 
only a few among many similar cases. 

The scientific skeptic may object that none of these 
incidents affords proof of conscious self-devotion in 
the animal world, but only of a blind instinct. Among 
human beings we should certainly call them altruistic 
— nay, moral. Why should we reckon them uncon- 
scious and egoistic when occurring among animals ? 

1 Thomson, Passions of Animals, p. 306, and Darwin, Descent of 
man, p. 101. 

2 Romanes, Animal Intelligence, p. 275. 

3 Seelenleben der Thiere, p. 64. 

4 Darwin, Descent of Man, p. 102. 

6 Romanes, Animal Intelligence, p. 272. 
6 Darwin, Descent of Man, p. 10 1. 



THE SANCTION FOB MORALITY IN NATURE 47 

But if they are illustrations of the action of blind in- 
stinct, then all the stronger is the disproof of the 
charge that nature has no sanction and command ex- 
cept for self-interest. All the stronger is the proof 
that there is an innate tendency, rooted in the consti- 
tution of nature and all social things, that irresistibly 
expresses itself in sympathetic impulses and self-sacri- 
ficing kindnesses. 

Finally, we may notice that nature, instead of frown- 
ing down and repressing this altruistic tendency, has 
constantly favored and sanctioned it. It has, indeed, 
been the very channel of the higher evolution of life. 
If we run over the names of the commoner and more 
numerous tribes of animals, the birds, deer, gophers, 
seals, kangaroos, antelopes, mice, and rabbits, or, going 
lower down, bees, ants, and grasshoppers, almost all 
are gregarious animals. The social animals have an 
immense preponderance over the unsocial. The car- 
nivora, whose cruel self-seeking Professor Huxley 
presents as the type and condition of success in the 
competitions of nature, are relatively very few in num- 
ber. They are the exceptions, not the normal type, 
any more than the train-robber and the Tammany 
" pantata " are typical Americans. Almost every- 
where these species are dying out. " The dragons of 
the prime," who " tear each other in their slime," and 
who have been presented as the true type of nature, 
" red in tooth and claw," lie in their fossil cemeteries, 
eternal witnesses to the judicial sentence which nature 
has pronounced upon them and their ways. Never in 
the annals of zoology was there such a Waterloo (as 
Mr. Fiske has well called it) as these giant Saurians 



48 TNE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

met. Among the carnivora that still survive it is 
evident that, in spite of their terrible claws, or fangs, 
and their strength and agility, these depredators and 
enemies of their fellows are everywhere falling behind 
in the race of life. Neither their natural weapons 
nor their terrible energy of self-seeking are equal, as 
aids to survival and multiplication, to the mutual help 
and greater intelligence of the social animals. Dar- 
win's dictum, that " those communities which included 
the greatest number of the most sympathetic members 
would flourish best," is found to be the fact and law 
of animal evolution. 

Professor Huxley charges that man, having pro- 
gressed because of those qualities which he shares 
with the ape and the tiger, now that he has become 
civilized and moralized would kick down the ladder by 
which he mounted. On the contrary, it has never 
been by tigerish cruelty, or a monkey-like wanton- 
ness, selfishness, or malicious mischievousness, that 
man has reached his superior position. These quali- 
ties, on the contrary, have arrested the progress of ape 
and tiger. Man has gone above them because of his 
larger share of the altruistic and social impulses, and 
the mutual help and cooperative industry which have 
tided the feeble over periods of weakness, and stimu- 
lated intelligence and skill as nothing else has done. 

So far from primitive man being a solitary, blond 
beast of prey, his hand against every man, whose 
fundamental instinct was cruelty and injury to others, 
as Nietzsche portrays him, the discoveries of arch- 
aeology show, on the contrary, that the earliest men 
we know were already social beings and united in con- 



TEE SANCTION FOR MORALITY IN NATURE 49 

siderable communities. The kitchen-middens of 
quarternary man, discovered and investigated by 
Steenstrup, have a thickness of three metres in some 
places, and must have been formed by a very numer- 
ous horde of men. " The piles of horses' bones at 
Solutre," says Max Nordau, in his work on Degenera- 
tion, " are so enormous as quite to preclude the idea 
that a single hunter, or even any but a very large 
body of allied hunters, could have collected and killed 
such a large number of horses in one place. As far 
as our view penetrates into historic time, every dis- 
covery shows us primitive man as a gregarious animal, 
who could not possibly have maintained himself, if he 
had not possessed the instincts which are presupposed 
in life in a community, viz., sympathy, the feeling of 
solidarity, and a certain degree of unselfishness. We 
find these instincts already existent in apes." 

" The splendid beast of prey," whom the worship- 
pers of self would present as the typical human type, 
is not only pernicious to the species, but, as Dr. 
Nordau points out, 1 is pernicious to itself also. " It 
rages against itself; it annihilates itself. The biolog- 
ical truth is that constant self-restraint is a necessity 
of existence, as much for the strongest as for the 
weakest. It is the activity of the highest human 
cerebral centres. If these are not exercised, they 
waste away ; i. e. y man ceases to be man ; the pre- 
tended ' over-man ' becomes sub-human, — in other 
words, a beast. By the relaxation, or breaking up of 
the mechanism of inhibition in the brain, the organ- 
ism sinks into irrecoverable anarchy in its constituent 
1 Nordau, Degeneration, p. 431, 



50 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

parts ; and this leads, with absolute certainty, to ruin, 
to disease, madness, and death, even if no resistance 
results from the external world against the frenzied 
egoism of the unbridled individual." 

In these social and altruistic impulses of the higher 
orders of animal life, the philosophic investigator sees 
plainly the great uplifting causes of vital evolution. 
This social and altruistic life is conditioned upon the 
rudimentary moral sense of the species. 

Unless, in the members of a group of birds, there 
is an incipient sense of justice, which leads them to 
respect the tid-bit which a neighbor has found, or to 
chastise together the member who has lazily and self- 
ishly appropriated the nest of a fellow bird, the social 
group would quickly fall to pieces. All naturalists 
who have studied gregarious species, have noticed 
amongst them a certain sense of personal rights and 
the duty of just dealing with their fellow-members in 
the group. The dogs in Constantinople have each 
their special street or alley, the invasion of which they 
resolutely resist. The prairie-dog and the beaver have 
their respective resting-places, which their comrades 
respect. 

Even in the animal kingdom, we thus find the moral 
disposition to exist in a more or less developed form. 
When we reach the human sphere, that which especially 
characterizes its progress is the greater and greater re- 
striction of selfish and unmoral competition by the 
growing sense of sympathy and justice in the com- 
munity. Even among barbarians, the qualities that 
make a tribe the fittest to survive are not merely 
strength of body, ferocity of disposition, and keen- 



TEE SANCTION FOR MORALITY IN NATURE 51 

ness in taking advantage of one's fellow, but rather 
the possession of trustworthy, helpful, and loyal dis- 
positions. Take a tribe of savages, among whom 
robbery, murder, licentiousness, cannibalism, and in- 
fanticide prevail. Is it not plain, from the nature of 
the case, that such tribes are not likely to leave abun- 
dant offspring ? Is it not the testimony of all travelers, 
that such tribes are decaying tribes, yearly diminish- 
ing, tribes on whose head nature has already pro- 
nounced sentence ? 

When, from the low state of morals among certain 
Australian and African savages, it is argued that we 
have here the proof and illustration of the general 
absence of moral qualities in primitive humanity, the 
real sequence of cause and effect is reversed. It is, 
on the contrary, precisely because such tribes have 
been deficient in average moral quality, that they have 
failed to march upward on the road of civilization 
with the rest of mankind, and have fallen into these 
bog-holes of savage degradation. It is only when 
humanity is spurred on by conscience to the faithful 
discharge of great duties, that our race develops to 
the full stature of its manhood. 

Natural history, archaeology, and biology all com- 
bine their testimony to show the error of that view 
which denies to nature any moral lesson or tendency, 
and sees in evolution simply a cruel and selfish strug- 
gle. The sympathetic instinct and moral necessity 
that man feels belong to no artificial world opposed to 
the great order of the universe. They are rooted 
deep in those same natural bonds and sacred unities 
which, wherever red blood flows in the veins, have 



52 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

conditioned the very continuance of the species on 
the faithful discharge by each generation of their duty 
to others besides themselves. Vice and injustice are 
ever destroying themselves. The more single-eyed 
is selfishness, the more likely it is to starve itself to 
death. It is a matter of simple scientific observation 
that the preponderance of selfishness among a family 
or a people, and the decay of that family or people, 
go together. The predominance of egotism is a 
physiological sign that the vitality of the species is 
exhausted ; the family instinct dies out, and the indi- 
viduals lose their ability to experience normal and 
natural love, and cease to perpetuate themselves. 

As Dr. Nordau has pointed out : " We possess an 
unfailing means of determining the exact degree of 
vital energy in a given species, race or nation, in the 
proportion between the egotism and altruism of the 
individuals contained in it. The larger the number 
of beings who place their own interests higher than 
all the duties of solidarity and the ideals of the de- 
velopment of the species, the nearer is the species to 
the end of its vital career. While, on the other hand, 
the more individuals there are in a nation who have 
an instinct within them, impelling them to deeds of 
heroism, self-abnegation, and sacrifice for the com- 
munity, the more potent are the vital energies of the 
race" ("The Conventional Lies of Civilization/' 
p. 270). 

The best of social fertilizers, then, are affection and 
sympathy. Virtue has a self-propagating power. 
Self-sacrifice, emptying the soul of the dregs of self- 
ishness, and filling it with the living water of the 



THE SANCTION FOR MORALITY IN NATURE 53 

Eternal Spirit, makes harvests bourgeon and ripen, 
wherever its irrigating stream spreads abroad. Morality 
is no invention of priests, statesmen, or philosophers. 
It is an irresistible growth of the human heart, the 
fairest blossom, the age-long victory and product of 
that Divine Life of the universe that has ever moved 
onward from chaos to cosmos, from carnal to spiritual. 
That lustrous march is no drama of red-toothed 
carnage, but a patient ascent through successive 
planes of wider and more intimate cooperation, fusing 
individuals in families, families in tribes, tribes in na- 
tions, and nations in the universal family of God's 
children, in which Jew and Greek, male and female, 
black and white, must have their equal right and 
place before the tribunal of Christian equity and 
sympathy. The highest efflorescence on the century- 
plant of cosmic life, the message of nature, as of 
Scripture, is Love. 

The universe is God's unfenced and all-inclusive 
communion table; and every act of humane minis- 
tration, every helpful hand stretched out to the weak 
or fallen is a sacred rite in its holy Eucharist. 



CHAPTER III. 

THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES AND THE KNOWABILITY 
OF DIVINE REALITIES. 

At the threshold of the investigation of the special 
problems presented by the relations of science to re- 
ligion there lies the preliminary question : What can 
we know in religious things, and how ? 

This is properly a question of pure metaphysics, 
with which science has nothing to do, and there ought 
not to be upon this point any conflict between the 
scientific and the religious world. Science may 
properly declare what she has learned and how 
she has learned it. But when she proceeds to de- 
termine what and how alone it is possible to know 
anything, and engages in analyses of consciousness, in 
investigations of the laws of thought, and clumsily 
would spin again, over the eyes of faith, the subtle 
logical webs of Hume and Kant, then it is evident 
that science has strayed into the realm of metaphysics 
and is trying " her prentice hand " upon the problems 
of philosophy. 

Nevertheless, though but an interloper and a 
neophyte herself in this field, or rather just for this 
reason, science has of late assumed absolute authority 
in the domain of the knowable, and has summarily 
ordered religion into close confinement. The brilliant 
successes of modern science, — rivalling all wonders of 

54 



THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 55 

the romancers, seven-leagued boots, lamp of Aladdin, 
wand of fairy, or what not, — these marvelous achieve- 
ments have made her believe that her favorite methods 
are the only ones by which anything is to be known. 
He who would build up solid structures of fact, not air- 
castles of thought, must work, science tells us, by observa- 
tion, induction, and verification. He must concern 
himself, so science orders, only with what is discernible 
by sense, and must ignore the suprasensible. All that 
we can know is phenomena. Realities can never be 
reached. Things in themselves are far beyond our 
knowledge. The idea of immaterial spirit must be 
assigned, as Vogt commands, to a place among specu- 
lative fables. Substance, essence, soul, — these are but 
high-sounding terms which cover so many chimeras. 
Certainly, it is urged, it is not for man to know God. 
It is not for the finite to think to find out the Infinite. 
All conceptions involving infinity, — such as creation^ 
self-existence, eternity, absolute reality (Herbert 
Spencer labors at length to show in his First Prin- 
ciples), — involve the inconceivable; and though by 
our familiarity with the sounds we may think we un- 
derstand them, they are really but " pseudo-ideas, 
symbolic conceptions of the illegitimate order." " The 
power which the universe manifests is utterly inscru- 
table," a conclusion to which Professors Huxley and 
Tyndall gave repeated and emphatic " Amens." 
When the question is asked, " Who made the uni- 
verse ? " Professor Tyndall replied, " As far as I can 
see, there is no quality in the human intellect which is 
fit to be applied to the solution of the problem. It 
entirely transcends us." 



56 TEE NfiW WORLD AND THE JSfEW THOUGET 

Science thus denies to religion a foothold in the 
realm of the knowable. The objects which she would 
worship are banished into an impenetrable darkness, 
and all that is left for her is to cover her head and 
veil her face before the mysterious realm. In the 
solemn emotions of the heart she may indulge herself 
freely, if she likes; but she must not presume to 
fashion the vague thought of that which she reveres 
into any definite shape. She must not venture to 
speak of that which she adores as if it were in any 
sense known to her. " The only language concerning 
the divine," as Renan says, " that does not degrade 
God is silence." 

There is in this attitude a semblance of a deeper 
religiousness. Spencer calls it " the true humility " ; 
Renan characterizes it as " the effect of a profound 
piety, trembling lest it blaspheme." But it is in truth, 
the subtlest and most dangerous attack on religion. 
The old-fashioned atheism said bluntly, " There is no 
God," and the extremity of its folly was its own 
refutal. The infidelity of to-day says, " Whether or 
not there is any God, we can know nothing at all 
about Him, and so ought not to waste our time by 
taking Him into consideration. If it pleases you, 
however, to embrace with the deepest longings of 
your nature this blank mystery; if, debarred from 
knowing, you find consolation nevertheless in the 
exercise of your creative faculties, in fashioning the 
mystery in accordance with your words, why then," 
say Tyndall and Huxley, " do so ; only have regard 
enough for propriety and the exclusive prerogatives 
of science to confine your worship to that of the 



THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 57 

silent sort at the altar of the unknown and the un- 
knowable." 

Practically, there is little difference between this 
theory of spiritual nescience and outright denial of 
spiritual existence. The assurance that we are, and 
must always remain, in dense ignorance of spiritual 
things kills the hope of heaven and the reverence for 
the divine. It takes from conscience its authority, 
and withers every religious emotion. Who can wor- 
ship an absolute darkness, an utter silence? If the 
absolute reality be utterly inscrutable there is no 
reason to think of it under one aspect more than any 
other. It may as likely be cruel as kind, contemptible 
as venerable, vile and treacherous as majestic and 
faithful. If we ought to revere it, there ought to be 
something in it cognizable as worthy of reverence. 
Why, if it be utterly unknowable, should we not hate 
it as rightly as love it, despise it instead of adoring 
it? To make God a name sweeter, grander, more 
venerated than all others, it must be more than a 
piece of blank paper. To build that temple of re- 
ligion where songs of praise and thanksgiving, aspi- 
rations for a better life, hopes of a brighter and eternal 
home and vows of solemn consecration spontaneously 
spring from the heart and ascend worthily and not in 
bitter mockery, we need other material than an eye- 
blinking fog-bank. 

That know-nothingism in religion, then, which cer- 
tain scientific cliques would establish, has not the first 
shred of a claim to be considered its best friend. As 
little claim has it to be founded on truth or clear 
ideas. It is true enough that no sense-observation 



58 THE NEW WOELD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

can show us spiritual things. But neither does sense 
restrict itself to the horizon of the visible, the tan- 
gible, and the sensible. Tyndall justly speaks of " that 
region inaccessible to sense, which embraces so much 
of the intellectual life of the investigator." When 
that which the microscope fails to see is regarded as 
non-existent, " then I think," he says, " the micro- 
scope begins to play a mischievous part," and he 
proceeds to point out many cases where structure and 
structural changes must be believed to exist although 
the microscope can make nothing of them. 

As it is in mineralogy and biology, so it is in 
chemistry, thermo-dynamics, and optics. What is the 
whole of these, as systematized sciences, built upon ? 
Upon the assumption of the existence of the mole- 
cule, the atom, and the ether. Yet of these units of 
matter how many have been isolated, separately 
weighed, measured, or touched? Of their ceaseless 
motions how many have been felt or seen ? Of this 
omnipresent ether, some eleven trillion times, or more, 
as extensive as ordinary matter, how many particles, 
what smallest quantity, has been observed ? Not one. 
The largest molecule, it is calculated, is a thousand 
times smaller than any particle the microscope can 
separately discern and the ether is immensely subtler 
even than this. 

Again, let the scientist tell us, why it is that in any 
case that he chooses of outward observation, he trusts 
the report of his senses as assuring him of any out- 
ward fact? You assume, for example, that when 
your senses observe or verify anything, then you have 
something you can confide in. Why so? Do you 



THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 59 

say that you have learned from experience on other 
occasions that the impressions of your senses are 
correctly conformed to the permanent something im- 
pressing them ? But in reality this does not establish 
the permanent something as outside of yourself. It 
may be, perhaps, only a coherent abiding group of 
subjective sensations. In reality no experience of the 
correctness of the sense upon other occasions, how- 
ever many, suffices to show that it was not wrong in 
this. A certain antecedent and a certain consequent 
may have been connected for a hundred million of 
times, and yet the next time (a possibility of which 
Mr. Babbage's calculating machine furnishes an actual 
instance) the consequent may be different. So far 
from this trust in our senses being furnished by 
experience, it is what always does and must precede 
experience. It is what alone makes experience pos- 
sible and shows it to be applicable. As Professor 
Huxley has acknowledged, this trust in the veracity 
of our senses at the very moment that we make the 
sensory observations is but an assumption, and when 
that moment has passed, it is but an " unverifiable 
hypothesis." 1 Why, then, do we make such an as- 
sumption, such an " unverifiable hypothesis"? Be- 
cause of the mental need, because it is an intuition of 
our reason, or, as Professor Bain calls it, " the fore- 
most of the instinctive tendencies of the mind." 
Again, before the physicist considers that he really 
understands the object that he has found, before he 
has any true scientific knowledge of it, he feels that 
he must classify it, refer its phenomena to some law 

1 Popular Science Monthly, March, 1 87 5, p. 576. 



60 TEE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW TEOUGET 

in accordance with which it takes place, some force 
that has produced it. Why is this ? Again it must 
be answered, it is from a mental need, the instinct of 
natural order, of constant derivation of effect from 
cause. 

It is the intuitive principle, then, that in science 
supplies the cement that binds the loose fact-grains of 
observation into coherent and valuable structures. 
The lowest stories of the scientific temple cannot be 
built up without this, and the higher still more demand 
it. The discerning physicist must recognize that the 
grandest victories of science are those which it has 
won by the aid of the imagination beyond the bounds 
of the visible. Geometry, e. g., is throughout a work 
of mental architecture, grounded upon and guided by 
pure mental insight of space. Had geometrical truths 
required for their acceptance demonstration from ob- 
servation we should have known hardly a single prop- 
osition. An exact right-angle has no existence as 
matter of experience. A perfect sphere is unattain- 
able in practice. Arithmetic, algebra, astronomy, are 
ideal constructions, resting on the metaphysical con- 
ception of number, and nowhere conforming to ex- 
actly ascertained fact. In electricity, magnetism, 
thermo-dynamics, the subtile analyses of modern in- 
vestigators have banished altogether the former the- 
ories of material fluids, and substituted the concep- 
tion of invisible forces. The power that moulds the 
crystal, that attracts the magnet, that moves along 
the electric wire, can be seen only by the mental eye. 
Observed facts form, of course, the starting-point of 
knowledge, but they do not constitute its limit. 



THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 61 

Reason is not to be chained around the ankle with re- 
torts and balances, like a convict with ball and chain. 
The wise savant must admit, as the distinguished 
Bertholet expressly has done, that " there may be 
something else to conceive, without knowing it ex- 
perimentally, than connections of phenomena, and 
that outside the limits where positive science asserts 
itself it may be possible, without excess of mysticism, 
to perceive the outlines, and to trace the sketch of a 
certain ideal science where first principles, causes, and 
ends find their place, and legitimately support it." 
" It is not," in truth, as Caro has well said, " the new 
fact which constitutes a discovery." It is " the idea 
which attaches itself to the fact. Facts are neither 
great nor little in themselves. The grandeur is in the 
idea which marshals them. Those who make dis- 
coveries are those who present us with a new idea 
which puts old or petty facts in a striking light. 
And this comes not so much from an induction as 
from an instinctive fore-feeling of the order of nature. 
So far from the mind being a blank tablet, learning 
everything from experience, the fact is that expe- 
rience is only fruitful when it is guided by something 
that goes before and beyond facts, which solicits them, 
which, impelled by the momentum of the innate idea, 
interrogates nature, compels it under its urgent 
catechizings to deliver up its secret, revealing as a 
reality of nature the law hitherto but dreamed of by 
the thinker." 

Even in the scientific domain, then, comparatively 
little can be known unless the external vision be sup- 
plemented by the inward sight and the sense-percep- 



62 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

tion be enlarged by the mental intuition. And in the 
religious world it is by the same means that we learn 
those spiritual phenomena, — personality, free-will, 
sense of duty, — and those grand ideas, right and 
wrong, infinity, perfection, and divinity, that are the 
ineradicable roots of faith and piety. Not only is 
there more than one road to the land of knowledge, 
but he who would reach its richest mines, its grand- 
est spiritual truths, must take the road of spiritual 
discernment. Science has failed to find them, and 
declared them undiscoverable, simply because it has 
traveled on the wrong path and used the wrong in- 
struments. To seek to learn the presence of the 
moral law by an electrometer, or to test for the exist- 
ence of the soul with litmus paper, or to discover God 
by the spectroscope, is as fruitless a quest, and fruitless 
for the same reason, as to seek to taste a sound, or to 
verify the beauty of the Sistine Madonna by making 
a chemical analysis of the pigments used upon it. In 
such cases the failure to observe the objects searched 
for does not demonstrate their non-existence, but 
simply the application to the inquiry of wrong 
methods. Against the failure of the sense to dis- 
cover anything, I put the success of the spirit. Not 
till the perfume of the rose is disproved by the inabil- 
ity of the eye to see it ; not till spherical geometry 
is shown false by the undiscoverability in nature of 
a perfect circle or by the absence of any absolute 
verification of the theorems concerning it, may the 
negative testimony of outward observation avail aught 
against the positive testimony of the religious facul- 
ties. 



THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 63 

But intuition and instinct, we shall be told, are full 
of illusions, and moreover have no safeguard such as 
verification affords to observation. There is no 
method by which we can test them, to distinguish the 
false from the true, — if there be any true. And so 
far from having a divine origin, and testifying legiti- 
mately to eternal and universal truths, they are, in 
reality, like our prejudices and our tastes, products of 
human experience. Our intuitions are thus subject to 
the same conditions as our experience, and give no 
absolute truth. The axioms of geometry, as Pro- 
fessor Helmholtz has shown, though necessary truths 
to us, may be false in another sphere. Imagine be- 
ings living and moving on the surface of a sphere, 
able to perceive nothing but what is on the surface, 
insensible to all else. The axioms of Euclid would 
not there be valid. The axiom, for instance, that 
there is only one shortest line between two points 
would not, on such a sphere, be the truth. For be- 
tween two diametrically opposite points an infinite 
number of shortest lines, all of equal length, could be 
drawn. Similarly, other axioms and propositions of 
our geometry would no longer hold good. 

Now, what shall we say to this ? We willingly 
admit that not unfrequently what are mere prejudices 
or ungrounded prepossessions, pass themselves off or 
are mistaken, for genuine intuitions. We admit that 
intuitions are not, at the first, mature or purified from 
other elements, and that it takes great carefulness to 
disentangle and discriminate them from the other 
things with which they are involved. They come 
into the world not as full-formed powers, but rather 



64 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

as the capacities and potentialities of mental life. 
Only gradually do these embryo faculties unfold, and 
while experience is not their cause, it is undoubtedly 
the occasion and condition of their development. 
Between their adult and their rudimentary phase 
there is as wide a difference as between the grown 
bird and the egg. That the manifestations of the 
human intuitions should vary or should sometimes, 
especially among savage tribes, be absent altogether, 
is, then, no evidence against their trustworthiness or 
reality. If they sometimes delude us, it is but the 
same thing that the senses do. Scarcely a week 
passes, even with persons of intelligence, in which 
there is not more or less illusion of the perceptive 
faculties. 

But these observations of sense you say are verified 
by other observations of the same sense or other 
senses, or, if illusions, are corrected by their disagree- 
ment with such other observations. But what veri- 
fication have intuitions ? The same I answer as your 
perceptions. When you have verified one perception 
by another, what do you verify your verification by ? 
If it has no verification, how is it any better guarantee 
than the preceding perception ? If it has a verifica- 
tion, what is it — another perception ? something out- 
side of itself, or in itself? As long as verification is 
sought in further observations, in corroborations not 
self-evident, we must continue our search for some 
more valid verification. We can stop only when we 
come to some self-evident truth, which needs no ex- 
ternal buttress. We always do rest, and can only 
rest, our perceptive verifications at last in some intui- 



THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 65 

tion. " Intuition has no verification ; and conse- 
quently no safeguard," do you say ? I reply : " It is 
its own verification and safeguard. Verification itself 
is preceded and conditioned upon it/' 

How, then, if we are cut off from perceptive cor- 
roboration, can we distinguish between a false and a true 
intuition ? The test is found in mental analysis. The 
guarantee of true intuitions is their simplicity, irre- 
ducibility, ultimateness, universality, above all, their 
necessity. The best criterion of a truth, as Herbert 
Spencer declares, is " the inconceivability of its nega- 
tion/' and the mark of reality is " inexpugnable per- 
sistence in consciousness." There are conditions 
under which the intuitions may not be applicable. In 
a world of two dimensions the axioms of geometry 
of three dimensions would not of course hold true. 
But this does not prove that the axioms and demon- 
strations of Euclid are false ; only that conditions may 
be conceived in which they would not apply. The 
axioms and demonstrations are true eternally, even 
though nowhere in nature should be found the con- 
ditions in which they could be applied and realized. 

Here we are met by the objections of the evolution- 
ist school, that thffee intuitions are really but prod- 
ucts of the experience of the race, — mental habits 
formed by association and consolidated by inheritance, 
and thus ingrained in the cerebral structure of each 
descendant, — so that on the application of the ap- 
propriate stimulus, the ideas of the man of to-day are 
given the same forms as they had in his ancestor. 

As regards this I would remark, in the first place, 
that it is an explanation quite inconsistent with the 



66 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

main theory, the evolution hypothesis, of those who 
offer it. The law of evolution is the ascent from the 
lower to the higher, from the simple to the more 
complex, from the instinctive to the rational. But ac- 
cording to this theory the habits and powers which 
are now involuntary and unconscious were formerly 
more voluntary and conscious. The earlier faculties 
of animals, for example, were the higher, and their 
present state a degeneration. Why do we give to the 
instincts of the bee, the wasp, the beaver, a special 
place in our thoughts, rather than suppose them to be 
ordinary exercises of the conscious reason of the 
creature ? Because the knowledge which the opera- 
tions of instinct exhibit, the acquaintance with phys- 
ical and physiological laws, and even with the mental 
qualities and dispositions of other animals which it 
displays, and the processes of reasoning by which ad- 
vantage is taken of them, do not seem to us attribu- 
table to the conscious mind of the animal without 
absurd incongruity with the limited intelligence of the 
creature in other respects. But the absurdity is just 
as great or greater to attribute it to the conscious 
knowledge and reasoning of the same species in 
earlier generations. It is true enough that in man 
many actions become instinctive and mechanical as 
the result of a previous intellectual operation of the 
self-conscious or reasoning kind. But the idea that 
instinct in all other animals has the same origin, the 
Duke of Argyll rightly calls " a dream due to the ex- 
aggerated anthropomorphism of those very philoso- 
phers who are most apt to denounce this sort of error 
in others. . . . The theory of experience assumes 



THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 67 

the preexistence of the very powers for which it pro- 
fesses to account. The very lowest of the faculties 
by which experience is acquired is imitation. But the 
desire to imitate must be as instinctive as the organs 
are hereditary by which imitation is effected." Then 
follow in their order all the higher faculties and ideas, 
such as those of space, time, law, purpose, cause, by 
which the lessons of experience are put together into 
an ordered whole. Every step in this process sup- 
poses the preexistence of powers and tendencies an- 
terior to experience, instinctive and innate. As 
Herbert Spencer himself has truly said, " Those who 
contend that knowledge results wholly from the ex- 
periences of the individual, fall into an error as great 
as if they were to ascribe all bodily growth and struc- 
ture to exercise, forgetting the innate tendency to 
assume the adult form." But to assign it all to the 
experience of the individual's ancestors equally neg- 
lects the main-factor in the case, the innate tendencies 
not only of physical structure but of mental habit, 
that must have preexisted before these creatures could 
have learned anything at all from experience. 

So, too, he who explains our natural beliefs as mere 
unmeaning agglutinations from the lower elements of 
our experience, formed by the association of ideas, 
commits the error of overlooking the significant fact 
involved in those laws of association themselves. 
" For the very idea of association," as has been well 
pointed out, supposes a guiding impulse. How can 
we classify without a standard of classification ? How 
can we connect without channels of connection ? 
Laws of association are but the manifestation of pre- 



68 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

determined associating tendencies or principles in the 
mind. Did not these exist, a man would be no more 
capable of learning from experience than an oyster is. 
But let us grant for the moment the truth of the 
hereditary experience theory, and see what comes 
of it. Suppose we trace our instincts and intuitions 
back to the consolidated experience of our ancestors. 
Let us say that we think with the intelligence, not 
only of the individual, but of the whole race, from the 
earliest epoch of savage life down to the present. 
Then, if you wish, grant the further hypothesis of the 
evolutionist, that the man is the child of lower, ape- 
like forms, and these of still lower, and thus trace the 
race down to some simple ascidian or jelly-fish. Then 
resolve life into the happy combination of physical 
forces, and mind into the product of nervous action 
under the influence of the surrounding universe of 
matter. What then ? If the mind is but a part and 
product of the universe of matter, then the laws of mind 
are but the laws of matter released and transformed. 
They are the laws of mind on this higher stage of ex- 
istence, because of old they were the laws of matter in 
the lower stage. Our fundamental forms of thought, 
our universal instincts and necessary intuitions point, 
then, to universal facts of nature which engendered 
them. Instead of being subjective merely, or possibly- 
delusive, they must correspond to the objective facts 
of nature to which their existence is due. They bear 
sure witness to the existence in the cosmic environ- 
ment about them, of all those great principles, forces, 
and truths to which they are the natural and necessary 
self-adjustments. We know things, that is, as they 



THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 69 

are; our knowledge of the universe, given in our 
universal instincts and necessary intuitions, though 
quite a limited knowledge, is true as far as it goes. 

But if we may trust to those instincts and intuitions 
which testify to the existence of spiritual things suffi- 
ciently to accept such order of existence as a fact, can 
we know any more than the bare fact of such ex- 
istence ? Is not the whole nature of spiritual things, 
it is urged, shrouded in inscrutable mystery? The 
infinite, the divine, things in themselves, are not these 
beyond the possibility of knowledge to finite minds ? 
Now it is true that the limits of our knowledge are 
very narrow, and also that within these narrow limits 
our knowledge is very imperfect. In truth, there is 
nothing that we know completely. Our bosom friend 
is a foreign kingdom to us. We have touched at most 
but at a port or two along the shores of his spiritual 
realm. There are multitudes of inlets hidden from us 
— vast provinces of his life and being which our most 
adventurous explorations have never reached. Even 
the most familiar object, the grass-blade, the drop of 
water, the simplest crystal, has something about it that 
is unknowable. To explain any one of these com- 
pletely we must know the whole cosmos. Especially 
is this so in the religious realm. For, as Strauss has 
truly said, " there is nothing profound without mys- 
tery/' Grander and brighter than all other truths, as 
spiritual truths are, their shadows naturally are equally 
pronounced. We shall always remain ignorant of much ; 
probably we shall remain ignorant of even the greater 
pert of what relates to the origin and history of the uni- 
verse, the character, nature, and relations of God and the 



70 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

soul. Nevertheless, to maintain that the darkness here 
is total is just as much of an error as to maintain that all 
is light. Though we cannot know divine things with 
complete fulness, we may yet know them in part. 
Though human intellect cannot fathom to the bottom 
the depths of spirit, nor follow out to infinity the divine 
curve, yet it can drop the plummet of thought deep 
enough to know whether this sacred mystery can be 
any form of matter or blind force ; or whether it must 
be thought to be something higher. It can trace out 
a section of the infinite hyperbola sufficient to show 
whether the curve run by chance or law, towards the 
irrational or the rational, the evil or the good, the 
impersonal or the personal. 

The boundary of the knowable, in the first place, is 
not a rigid, immovable limit. It gives to the pick of 
the scientist, to the probe of the philosopher, to the 
clearer eye of the seer. One age leaves it at a differ- 
ent place from that where it found it. If the realm 
of the unknown is never to cease to surround that 
of the known, it is not because no incursions can be 
made into it, but because, however much it gives up, 
its infinity is inexhaustible. It is a path that, though 
knowable in front as well as behind, is yet so bound- 
less that, though the discoverer go on and on, he will 
still find ever lengthening vistas of the unexplored to 
invite him further still. 

In the second place, it should be noticed that he 
who pronounces God absolutely unknowable erects 
his own inability as a bound for all attairfments, and, 
moreover, as Martineau has pointed out, he implicitly 
attributes to that which he exalts as infinite and un- 



THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 71 

limited a very restricting limitation and incapacity, 
viz., the inability to make himself known. For, evi- 
dently if there is no possibility of God's being known 
by man, then on the side of God there must be an 
equal impossibility of His making Himself known. 
To assert this seems to me to be a gross presump- 
tion rather than the humble and modest attitude that 
it has been reckoned. A genuine humble-mindedness 
would qualify even the confession of its own ignorance 
and inability with a doubt of that. The true agnostic 
ought rather to speak of God as one of the Hindu 
Upanishads speaks of Brahma, " Whosoever knows 
this truth, I do not know that I do not know him, he 
knows him." 

In one sense the inconceivable is incredible. That 
which contradicts our reason is certainly not to be 
believed; for it cannot be even thought. In one 
sense the infinite is inconceivable, — it is unpicturable, 
that is, by the imagination, it is unrealizable by the 
wildest fancy. When the world-conquering ape, in 
the Chinese fable, aspired to subdue heaven also, 
Brahma held out his hand, and bade him leap over it. 
Over eye-wearying plains, over range after range of 
snow-clad summits the ape flew in his mighty bound, 
and alighted on the loftiest mountain peak that he had 
ever beheld. But, lo ! it was but one of Brahma's 
fingers. So, in our mightiest flights of intellect, we 
can pass over but a finger's breadth of the divine. 

Nevertheless, the inconceivable, in another sense, 
namely, that which overpasses our finite faculties not 
by contradiction, but by immensity, is certainly cred- 
ible, is, indeed, absolutely necessary to thought. The 



*72 THE JSfEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

idea of the infinite, though not to be pictured, is one 
clearly thinkable. This infinity of immensity, that 
which is more than any finite, is a quite positive idea. 
Its vastness in quantity may debar us from enclosing 
it in our thought, but it does not prevent our grasping 
enough of it to know its quality. It may not be en- 
tirely comprehended ; but it is not unintelligible in its 
essential characteristics. Magnitude and nature are 
different things. Because one cannot be encompassed 
in thought, we are not therefore utterly ignorant of 
the other. I cannot comprehend in my thought this 
immense ocean of air in which we live, and by which 
we breathe. Nevertheless, I know its nature, its 
chemical constituents, its pressure, elasticity, fluidity, 
and other mechanical properties, and I know that 
they are essentially the same in every part of the im- 
mense atmospheric sea that envelops the globe. Sup- 
pose the immensity of the air actually infinite instead 
of merely immensely beyond our comprehension, 
would its nature be any the less knowable ? Take the 
infinite space that our reason compels us to believe in, 
and while our minds are unable, evidently, to realize 
its extent, yet can we think of it in any part, even at 
infinity, as anything else than space, — possessed of 
the same three dimensions, and capable of holding ex- 
tended objects? Take a cylinder. Prolong it in 
thought to infinity. Though we cannot by utmost 
stretch of our imagination follow it there, yet we know 
that at infinity it would still keep all the character- 
istics of a cylinder, and none others. A section made 
at right-angles to the axis would always be a circle. 
Similarly with a trait or attribute of the divine ; its 



THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 73 

enlargement to the infinite scale does not change it 
into something else. Infinite power we know is still 
power ; infinite w T isdom without doubt is still wisdom. 
Love in the divine is not something entirely unknow- 
able, but the sweetest and fullest form of affection. 
Spiritual things are not exalted by immensity or in- 
determinateness, but by perfection of character. 
God's infinitude is not exclusive, separating Him from 
His creation, but rather inclusive. Our knowledge is 
not so much erroneous as inadequate. We may 
trust it not only for what it tells, but for the direction 
in which it points us. 

It seems to be thought that somehow that which 
we cannot or do not know must be necessarily an- 
tagonistic to what we do know, and puts it all in 
doubt. But that which must always remain unknown 
certainly cannot upset our present knowledge ; it can do 
nothing to us that should frighten us, or unsettle our 
minds. And that which, though not yet known, may 
hereafter be brought within the field of our knowl- 
edge must, through that very possibility of being 
known, have harmonious relations with our present 
knowledge. We can come to understand the un- 
known only as we can find in it some likeness to the 
already known. The new knowledge will modify the 
old ; it may add to it ; but it will not be totally dis- 
similar or contradictory. This is the experience of 
all growth in knowledge hitherto, that the same order 
holds, new truths being unfolded from the old, not 
blankly opposing it. And we may rightly presume 
it for the remainder. " Doubt ought not to be thrown 
upon an intuition or a demonstration," as George 



74 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

Henry Lewes has justly said, in his " Problems of Life 
and Mind," " merely because it is an intuition or a 
demonstration of one item in the great whole itself. 
If we can resolve an equation of the first or second 
degree, this absolute certainty is not disturbed because 
there are equations of the sixth degree which surpass 
our powers. . . . The existence of an unknown 
quantity does not affect the accuracy of calculations 
founded on the known quantities of the element." 
Certainly, from the mere possibility, if there be such 
a possibility, of an upsettal of our present ideas (some- 
time or somehow ; no one pretends to say when or 
how) no sensible man should discard all the solidly 
grounded truths already attained. The logical vice 
involved in the argument of Spencer and the agnostic 
school in general is, in fact, the very one that savants 
and logicians have blamed theologians for falling into. 
The agnostic school, it will be found, always starts 
with some, generally with a great many, assumptions 
as to the infinite and absolute, — what they are, and 
what they imply, — and from these they reason down 
towards the finite and the created, and because they 
find in this process of analysis, comparison, and 
logical development many inconsistencies and incon- 
ceivabilities, they leap to the conclusion that the ulti- 
mate Reality is in every respect unknowable, and that 
those attributes of power, wisdom, love, righteousness, 
with which humanity, as the result of its experience 
and intuition, has invested the divine are all delusive ; 
that, in short, we have no justification in assigning to 
the First Cause any attributes whatever. The agnostic 
thus turns his own inability to argue down correctly 



THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 75 

from the infinite into an accusation of the impossi- 
bility of the theist's arguing up from the finite towards 
the infinite. Mathematics, however, show that argu- 
ments from the infinite to the finite are rarely, if ever, 
trustworthy, while arguments from the finite up to the 
infinite are often sound and valuable. Because the 
agnostic, by inverting the proper method of reason- 
ing as regards the infinite, gets himself into trouble, 
does it at all follow that no valid results can be at- 
tained by the theist when he employs the right 
method ? 

In point of fact, however much men of science 
object to the use of the infinite, they themselves use it 
freely; in many departments they cannot proceed 
without it. In geometry the conceptions of the line, 
circle and sphere ; in mathematics the passage from 
the axioms of uniform motion to other forms of 
motion ; in algebra the calculus, the mightiest instru- 
ment of mathematical investigation, — all these require 
as indispensable the conception of the infinitely small, 
and reasoning upon it. Astronomy and geology, on 
the other hand, lead us to the correlative infinitude, 
the infinitely large. Especially do those who belong 
to the materialistic school, and scout most contemptu- 
ously the idea of any infinite when presented by 
theism, make without scruple the most confident as- 
sertions of the infinite in their own hypotheses. 
Strauss, Vogt, Buchner, Haeckel, each lays down, as 
fundamental principles of his system, the eternity of 
matter and the immortality of force. Even Herbert 
Spencer cannot get along without using the idea of 
the infinite. Though he has branded all ideas which 



76 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

involve infinite self-existence as pseudo-ideas, and con- 
sequently condemned all forms of theism, pantheism, 
and materialism as inevitably involving such illegiti- 
mate conceptions, no sooner has he laid theology, as 
he imagines, in ruins, and swept off the debris, and 
gone about his own system of thought-building, than 
he puts in again the same old condemned corner- 
stone ; he tells us that matter was uncreated and in- 
destructible, and that force always persists in abso- 
lutely unchanged quantity, — ideas which necessarily 
involve infinite duration both in the past and the 
future. And, more than this, the principle of thought 
by which science extends its reasonings beyond the 
finite is just the same as that by which religion claims 
to know the character of the divine, viz., that what is 
true up to a limit is true at the limit. 

But is not our knowledge confined to the relative ? 
it will still be urged. Can we know God in Himself? 
Can we think of the Absolute without determining and 
conditioning Him? Can we think of the divine 
except in the colors of the thinking self? Doubtless 
we cannot. But this, again, is a condition of all our 
knowledge. We can know no one in himself, out of 
his relations to us. We know a friend only by the 
various manifestations of his personality, his looks, 
tones, actions. And these must come into some con- 
nection with ourself. We cannot know a grain of 
corn in its inmost nature, irrespective of its appear- 
ance to us. We know it only by the phenomena that 
it manifests, its shape, hardness, color, t&ste. More- 
over, these manifestations must be manifestations to 
our special senses, our individual mind. What they 



THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 77 

are or may be independent of our sensibility we can 
never know. Whatever perception we have, the per- 
ceiving subject is mingled with it, and a factor in the 
product, and that perception is such only as the nature 
of our faculties allows it to be. Without eyes we can 
know no color, without ears, no sound, and the range 
of colors, the gamut of sounds, is such only as the 
structure of those organs allows. 

Now all this is true enough, and instead of this 
mystery of the absolute and this veil of the relative 
being death-sentences of faith, they are as innocent as 
any principle of knowledge that can be found. All 
that this famous difficulty amounts to saying is, that 
if we take away all that we can know of any object we 
cannot know what is left ; and this self-evident law of 
all things applies also to God, that we cannot know 
Him more fully or know Him by any different way 
than we know all other things. 

This, I say, is true enough. But about it has gath- 
ered a huge penumbra of notions that are not true, 
that do not follow. It does not follow, as is inferred, 
that because our knowledge is relative to us it is 
therefore deceiving. Why may not the relative be 
real and true ? Is there anything that necessarily con- 
fines genuineness, actuality, or substantiality to that 
which does not come into relation with us ? Why is 
all this to be attributed to that mental air-castle — 
" the thing in itself," or to the relations of things to 
other minds rather than to their relations to our 
minds ? What reason have we for assuming reality to 
be that which cannot appear, or which appears to 
other minds or in other relations than to us ? " If 



78 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

reality is inscrutable, then," as Lewes asks, " by what 
right can we affirm it different from the manifested 
things ? " I maintain that all things are known by 
their relations, for the simple reason that all things 
exist only in relations. I maintain that the relative, 
the phenomena that appear to us, are not mere 
phantasms, but parts of the great real. A man stubs 
his toe against the curbstone. The sensation within 
him is a real thing, the stone is a real thing. Doubt- 
less it is something more than what he feels it to be ; 
but it is at least this, in this relation. It may be 
thought of without reference to its present conditions, 
but it is just now, in reference to those conditions, 
precisely what he feels it to be. Remove it, and the 
whole equilibrium of the cosmos would feel the 
change. 

And moreover the realities, so far from being made 
unknowable to us by our relations to them, are re- 
vealed through those relations. To infer that we can 
know only the relations, never the things ; that we 
can become acquainted only with appearances, never 
with substances ; and that we have no reason to be- 
lieve in the existence, or to believe anything about 
the nature of things and substances, is another fallacy. 
Relations have no existence unless there are things 
to be related ; and if the things are entirely unknown, 
their relations must be also unknown. Appearances 
are impossible unless there is something to appear. 
And moreover through the relations themselves comes 
a knowledge of the things related. In the very ap- 
pearances we learn of the substances appearing. My 
desk, for example, manifests itself to my touch as 



THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 79 

hard and smooth ; to my eye as of a certain shape and 
color; to the ear, if it be vigorously struck, as pos- 
sessed of a certain resonance. These phenomena and 
relations to my sensitive self, speak of something 
which has power to impress me with these sensations ; 
they speak of something that abides, that I cannot 
banish by thinking it away — something that affects a 
photograph plate very much as it affects my eye; 
something that when I shut my eyes to it or go away 
from it, waits for my return in the very same group 
of appearances till I return. These qualities speak 
of some substantial unity in which they centre, some 
reality to which they belong, and whose nature, as it 
is in reference to me, is shown by them. Herbert 
Spencer arguing for our knowledge of matter, main- 
tains that though we know only the relative reality 
yet that that stands in such a fixed relation to the 
absolute reality that knowledge of one is tantamount 
to knowledge of the other. " The conditioned effect 
standing in indissoluble relation with the uncondi- 
tioned cause and equally persistent with it, so long as 
the conditions persist, is to the consciousness supply- 
ing those conditions equally real, . . . and for 
practical purposes is the same as the cause itself." 
This is true, and true for all phenomena, for all reali- 
ties. And in accordance with this principle, I claim 
that so far from the ultimate Reality, the divine, being 
inscrutable, we have no mean knowledge of it. We 
have knowledge not only of its existence, but of its 
nature. We know it as we know matter or force, as we 
know a magnet, a rose, a bird, — by its action upon 
us, by its manifestations to our faculties, " by the per- 



80 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

sistent impressions which are the persistent results of 
a persistent cause." God is in the manifestations of 
Himself which He presents in His created things, as 
well as in that mysterious essence behind the mani- 
festations. God is in the known as well as in the 
unknown. 

If the ultimate Reality be utterly unknowable, as 
Mr. Spencer says, then any manifestation of it would 
be impossible, or would be meaningless. The abso- 
lute Reality would be a blank to all intelligence. To 
make any predicate of it whatsoever would be illegiti- 
mate. Yet Mr. Spencer himself assigns attributes to 
the Unknowable. He speaks of it as eternal, omni- 
present, as active, as a power, and as a cause. Pro- 
fessor Tyndall calls God, " the power that makes for 
righteousness, intellectual as well as ethical." Here 
certainly is a good deal asserted about the character 
as well as about the existence of the absolute Reality, 
and in terms, moreover, derived from conscious ex- 
perience. By what reasoning process have these 
terms been attributed to the Supreme Existence? 
Nay, by what reasoning process has its Existence 
been known or affirmed ? " By our mental obliga- 
tion," to answer in words that Mr. Spencer himself 
has employed, " to regard every phenomenon as a 
manifestation of some power." By that constitution 
of our minds by which thought cannot be prevented 
from passing behind appearance, and trying to con- 
ceive a cause behind. But surely if this reasoning 
process is good to show us so much of the divine, it 
is good to show us much more. Every phenomenon 
of the universe is a real and true manifestation of the 



THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 81 

action and character of the supreme Cause. As the 
nature of oxygen, though tasteless to the tongue, 
odorless to the nose, invisible to the eye, not to be 
grasped by the hand, is yet known to us by the 
effects which it is still capable of, both mechanically 
and chemically, so can we know the God who is Him- 
self unobservable by any sense, through His constant 
actions and effects in the world. 

By studying these phenomena of the creation, then, 
we may learn the character of the Creator. The 
cosmos reveals that order which gives it its name. 
Steady laws in regular movement, in harmonious 
coordination carry on its manifold operations. Con- 
densing nebula, whirling cyclone, swinging tides, all 
have their place and their rule. The Power from 
which this order is the outcome, we may then know 
as orderly. 

Again, the cosmos manifests itself as a unity. To 
the first glance the world, indeed, seems a hurly-burly 
of contending powers, a conglomerate of a thousand 
different substances, laws, and existences. But as 
science, with its closer scrutiny examines it, the 
apparent discords melt away. The complex resolve 
themselves into combinations of the simple. The 
antagonisms reveal themselves as but efforts at stable 
equilibrium and coherences. Through the whole 
gamut of matter — yes, and of life, with all its num- 
berless forms and grades — is discovered the harmonic 
note. Energies and laws converge to one focus. 
Forces correlate and transform themselves one into 
the other, till under the outward diversity we can 
recognize but a single ultimate power. All manifesta- 



82 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

tions of the supreme thus resolving themselves into 
unity, can we not feel sure that the supreme Cause, 
however many modes of manifestation it may have, 
is itself one ? 

Again, let us survey the history of the world, the 
succession of living organisms, the path of human 
events. Is there not in these appearances another at- 
tribute of the ever-appearing clearly shown — the at- 
tribute of life? Nothing remains inert, but all is 
full of movement. Nothing remains stagnant, but is 
ever pushing forward, climbing up, unfolding. If 
sometimes there seems retrogression, it is but the back- 
ward curve of the spiral, to mount and enlarge still more. 
Species rise above species in an ascending hierarchy. 
The new age stands above every olden time. The proc- 
ess of the years brings with it widening to every power, 
more and more perfection to every form. Has this spon- 
taneous activity and continual process of adjustment 
towards higher and higher levels, this unfolding evo- 
lution, or in plain terms, growth, (the grand discovery 
of modern science) nothing to tell us of the nature 
of the power that is behind it ? Does it not, in fact, 
indicate at the heart of this self-moving universe, that 
which alone can move itself, that which alone can grow, 
namely a Life, the vital energy of the first cause ? 

Moreover, this order and progress in the universe, 
if we fully understand it, is arranged according to in- 
tellectual conceptions, exhibits systematic plans and 
purposes. Means combine to promote ends. The 
thoughts of the mathematicians are reproduced in the 
laws of plant and planet. All parts and processes 
move towards the fulfilment of one grand design, a 



THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 83 

greater and greater perfection. The developing proc- 
ess, as it runs up from the insensate to the sensitive, 
from the instinctive to the rational, causes more and 
more intelligence to shine forth in the world. If 
mind in unconscious nature be denied, no one can 
deny its manifestation in the conscious parts of nature, 
animal and human mind. And this manifested in- 
telligence permeating the world, this mind blossom- 
ing forth from the central life, must bespeak (on the 
lowest physical view of its origin) that central life as 
also intelligent. 

Again, in the harmonious lines and forms of nature, 
blushing blossom and majestic mountain-mass, glow- 
ing sunbeam and checkered leaf-shade, we see a 
beauty that supplies an exquisite gratification. In the 
fruit and grain prepared in summer for our winter 
food, in the treasures of metal and fuel and precious 
stones built and stored for us in the bowels of the 
earth, in the million provisions for the comfort and 
happiness of every creature, in all these admirable 
adaptations that disclose themselves most exquisitely 
to those who examine most carefully, there is shown 
the grand sweep of the universe towards the good, the 
beneficent. Even in the bitter we find the sweet 
hidden ; through struggle and sorrow we are led to 
higher success. By bane and by bruise we are con- 
ducted to the abiding blessedness. Can we behold all 
these tokens of blessedness and love, and rationally 
say that they tell us of no benevolence, that they sug- 
gest no love in that Being whose power goeth forth 
so benignantly in space and time ? 

Once more, survey those visible things that especially 



84 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

manifest the invisible. Observe the moral, and spiritual 
elements of the world, the instincts of the right, the 
authority of moral law. Watch the invincible tide that 
sweeps towards justice, the remorse that chastises the 
guilty, the serene peace that rewards the pure-hearted. 
Consider the aspirations of the holy, the grand visions 
of the seer, the saint's consciousness of divine commun- 
ion. The mother counts her own life nothing if she may 
save her babe. The patriot makes way for liberty over 
his spear-pierced body. The martyr goes unwaver- 
ingly to the stake rather than be disloyal to truth. 
These grand illustrations of the nobleness of human- 
ity which age to age renews, their elements lying 
latent in every soul, are not they facts of the cosmic 
evolution ? Are not they manifestations of the ulti- 
mate Reality as truly as any other phenomena ? Are 
they not as rightly significant of its nature? Yes. 
As the picture shows the artist's sense of beauty, as 
the symphony exhibits the composer's musical taste 
and capacity, as the judge's administration of justice 
discloses his discernment of right and faithfulness to it, 
and as the father's self-sacrifice reveals his paternal 
love, so through the rectitude, justice, love, faithful- 
ness, and holiness manifested in mankind's noblest 
representatives do we know in the Creator of man a 
rectitude, justice, love, and holiness bright enough to 
give the moral images, which, even but dimly reflected 
on the mirror of human nature, so glorify it. Not 
that these qualities in us adequately represent the at- 
tributes of the divine, but rather that o'n their lower 
level they correspond to them, they shadow forth 
something of the brighter reality. That in the Su- 



THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 85 

preme there must be an intelligence at least as wise 
as our highest wisdom, a goodness at least as much 
and as good as our best, a real equal to our highest 
ideal and our loftiest aspiration — this is the necessary- 
inference from the manifestation of those qualities in us. 

Here, then, by those very methods of observation, 
generalization, and inductive inference by which 
physical science is built up, we can know something, 
not merely of the existence, but of the nature and at- 
tributes of the ultimate Reality, manifested in the 
universe. But if science may not admit this sketch 
of the divine character as affording any absolute or 
complete knowledge of it, it must at least logically 
admit it as sufficient relative knowledge, good as far 
as it goes, good as its own knowledge of the force 
and matter and motion that it talks so confidently of; 
good as these are for " good-working hypotheses " ; 
nay, as the only hypotheses that will work. 

The attributes with which theologians have usually 
invested the divine — such as infinity, eternity, omnis- 
cience, flawless holiness and absolute perfection and 
independence, are indeed, more or less unpicturable 
and unverifiable and quite metaphysical. 

It is well to admit this. 

Suppose then we should relinquish any claim 
to a knowledge of them, and thus avoid all the im- 
possibilities of knowing God, founded upon them, of 
which the agnostic makes so much. Suppose we 
claim only for the God of our worship a range as 
wide as the known universe, a duration no more vast 
than the oldest star-dust, a force as subtle merely as 
the cosmic energies, a manifested presence simply as 



86 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

grand, mysterious, noble, and beneficent as the uni- 
versal life in which we live and move and have our 
being, — surely, we have still left a Being divine enough 
to demand our most reverent worship. I am not con- 
cerned to vindicate against the doubter any of the 
metaphysical attributes which he claims prevent us 
from knowing God or believing in Him. If they hold 
him back from belief in God, I would say to him, 
" Let them go." We have still left within our knowl- 
edge and before our eyes the witness of a power and 
an intelligence enough, and vastly more than enough, 
to thrill us with awe, to quicken us to praise, and to 
command us, if we would win any success or true 
blessedness, to conform our will to that mightier will 
that governs all. 

That is the short and simple answer to these meta- 
physical quandaries of the agnostics which are so 
often regarded as insuperable barriers to faith in the 
divine. We not only can know a Being worthy of 
our worship, cause of all that comes into existence, a 
Being of dimensions and duration to which we can 
put no bounds ; but we do know such a Being. The 
agnostic knows Him already just as much as any one 
else. Only he calls that Being " Nature," not God, 
and speaks of it as if it were an independent power. 

But seriously to regard nature and God as two sep- 
arate powers or to think of the forces of the world as 
something independent of God is to abandon mono- 
theism and go back to polytheism. Ijt is not only 
poor theology, but poor science and poor philosophy. 
When men separate God from the forces that are His 
own energies, from the laws which are His own habits 



THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 87 

of action, and from the material manifestation which 
is His own body, and then try to prove His exist- 
ence, no wonder they hunt from room to room of the 
boundless mansion of earth and sky, and can find no 
separate God visible within the field of their telescope. 
But let us begin by recognizing space as His 
stature, eternity as His life, and each vibrating stream 
of light and heat that bridges the interstellar spaces as 
the throbbing pulses of the cosmic organism ; then 
we find that that divine face, as Browning says, 

" Far from vanish, rather grows, 
Or decomposes but to recompose, 
Become my universe that feels and grows." 

The question, then, becomes much simplified. The 
superhuman power, practically eternal and infinite, is 
before our eyes, besetting us on every hand. As 
Herbert Spencer, in the name of science, says, " Amid 
the mysteries that remain the more mysterious the 
more they are thought of, there will remain (to the 
scientist) the one absolute certainty that he is ever in 
the presence of an infinite and eternal energy from 
which all things proceed." 

So much is admitted to-day by modern science. 
The question is narrowed down to the alternative, Is 
this eternal power that fills all space an inanimate and 
unconscious power or a living and a conscious power ? 

Now to this question the agnostic again interposes, 
" It is impossible to know." Mr. Ingersoll recom- 
mends to us the answer of the Indian to the mis- 
sionary who was urging upon him the Christian faith. 
The Indian took a stick and made a little circle in the 



68 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

sand, and said, " That is what Indian knows." Then 
he made a larger circle round that, and said : " That 
is what white man knows. But out here, outside of 
the circle, Indian knows just as much as white man." 

That was undoubtedly a very clever stroke, — for an 
Indian. But for a white man to adopt it as conclusive, 
as Mr. Ingersoll does, shows a surprising ignorance of 
what the white man of this nineteenth century has 
accomplished. It is the glorious victory of modern 
science to have demolished such limitations on its 
knowledge. The Indian's knowledge covers the small 
valley in which he lives. The white man's extends 
not only to the larger state or hemisphere where he 
has traveled, but to provinces where he has never 
been, where no man has ever been. No man has ever 
seen the north pole or the other side of the moon ; 
yet we are as practically certain of their existence and 
character as if we had been there. We have discov- 
ered gases that no sense has directly observed, rays 
of the spectrum invisible to the eye, suns that no tele- 
scope has seen, yet whose courses and times of revo- 
lution and velocity through the sky the astronomer 
has carefully noted, calculated and verified. And in 
these unobserved suns of the stellar depths the man 
of science feels certain that the laws of heat, light, 
chemic affinity, mathematics, and geometry, are the 
same as here. Below, in the smallest germ, science 
finds force, law, growth, and rationality. Above, in 
the grandest and most distant solar systems, force, 
law, growth, and rationality again are' manifested. 
And in whatever still undiscovered galaxies may lie 
trillions of leagues beyond, whose existence is not yet 



THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 89 

either known or suspected, the same principles, we 
feel certain, will still rule there as here. As to that 
which it is impossible for us ever to know, we can of 
course say nothing. That, however, can in nothing 
affect or concern us. But that which, although it is as 
yet unknown, is conceivably knowable, must be recog- 
nized, by virtue of that knowability, as owning the 
dominion of those principles by which alone things 
are knowable. 

Whatever, then, lies outside the circle of our abso- 
lute knowledge does not interfere with the practical 
certainties of theistic faith. The reason is that this 
modern science of the white man of the nineteenth 
century has found out that the whole universe is 
woven out of the same material and spiritual web. 
The domain of knowledge — not merely present knowl- 
edge, but potential knowledge — is one coherent with 
itself and with what is already known. The cosmos 
is a unity, from end to end. The molecules of hydro- 
gen and sodium in these double suns that the spec- 
troscope informs us of, though the telescope cannot 
separate them, vibrate in unison with the sodium 
flames of our own earth. The same laws of gravita- 
tion that draw the falling penny that you toss up in 
the air back to the ground, wheel the farthest galaxies 
around their hidden astronomic centres, and the 
youngest, mistiest nebula of the skies is proceeding 
on the same path of evolution by which our own 
planet has ripened to its present condition. The 
various stages and realms of nature are not exclusive 
of one another, but inclusive, enclosing one another 
like the nest of concentric shells which make up a 



90 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

conjurer's ball. The vegetable kingdom includes the 
inorganic ; the animal kingdom includes the vegetable ; 
the human includes the animal and all below it. And 
so the divine, we may feel sure, however higher and 
grander than the human, will not be wanting in what 
forms the glory of man. 

Of course, we cannot wholly know God's nature ; 
but as little can we know ourselves, and yet be wholly 
ignorant of Him. The divine attributes are loftier and 
more numerous than the human. But, by the law we 
have just stated, they are not alien and without rela- 
tion to the human, but inclusive of the human. 
Whatever higher qualities God has, He is at least as 
wise, at least as just and good, as the human children 
He has brought into being; and, even as to that 
higher and mysterious centre of Divinity which is ever 
to remain a mystery, we may at least feel sure of this, 
— that the direction in which it lies is the direction of 
man's own highest powers, not that of the inferior and 
more meagre qualities of dead matter. 

This is the simple course of reasoning by which the 
religious thinkers of to-day feel sure that the grand 
universe about them is no wheel-work of unconscious 
machinery, but the organism of a boundless Life and 
superior Reason. The universe is permeated with 
order. All its forces and laws are unitary. It is ever 
climbing forward, pushing upward, growing and un- 
folding. 

This order and growth proceed according to ideal 
laws and conceptions, exhibit intelligible plans and 
purposes. The laws of the arrangement of the leaves 
on the stem and of the planets wheeling about their 



THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 91 

solar centres conform to one and the same mathe- 
matical formula. The grand current of the universe 
is ever towards the righteous and the beneficent. The 
history of man exhibits a steady moral progress. The 
course of evolution progressively exalts conscious 
personality and strengthens the foundations of justice, 
suppresses the lower and carnal, and refines, diffuses, 
and enthrones in power the spiritual. 

How do these qualities thus steadily emerge more 
and more in nature and man, unless they exist in their 
cause ? We can have no appearance unless there is 
something to appear. No blossom is evolved unless 
there is a seed, — a cause from which it is evolved. 
These phenomena of nature and man manifest, then, 
the action and character of the supreme Cause. At 
the heart of this self-moving, growing universe, there 
must be that as has been already suggested, which 
alone can initiate motion, can grow, — namely, a Life ; 
a life vast and all-powerful enough to produce what 
we see that it does produce. And this universal Life 
cannot work with such wondrous intelligence, justice, 
and beneficence, it cannot be imagined stirring us to 
love and righteousness as it does, unless there were in 
it an intelligence, rectitude, and loving kindness equal 
to our own loftiest aspirations. Surely, when we feel 
ourselves commanded with such an unconditional im- 
perative to do our duty and to love our neighbor that 
even life itself must be sacrificed to obey it, we cannot 
believe that it is from any being himself loveless or 
from any force or power itself immoral and insensate 
that we should have been charged with such insistent 
duties. 



92 . THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

The facts of the world, then, seem plainly to point 
to intelligence and benevolence, so high and wide that 
we can fix no bounds to them, as characterizing the 
supreme source and life of the world. 

But here the agnostic interposes with fresh dif- 
ficulties. If God be good, how comes it that justice is 
so often thwarted, that innocence is not a perfect 
shield, that famines like that of India to-day are per- 
mitted to occur ? 

In the problem of evil we have a serious difficulty, 
—the oldest and gravest difficulty to belief in a God 
worthy of our worship. But, while it is a difficulty, 
the difficulties on the other side, in rejecting the idea 
of any divine causation or any beneficent purpose, are 
far greater. If the source from which humanity 
springs be but dead mechanism, destitute of goodness, 
whence came this human pity? Mr. Ingersoll's own 
indignant protest against such a doctrine as that of 
eternal hell or against the unmerited sufferings of the 
innocent, — this and every other manifestation of 
human compassion and indignation against wrong, 
such as our skeptics and agnostics are so often found 
expressing, are the strongest presumption of the divine 
goodness and righteousness. Can God have put this 
instinct of the lawful desert of virtue, of the injustice 
of purposeless, unmerited suffering, into His children's 
hearts, and no similar feeling be in His own heart ? 
Does the agnostic really fancy that in himself there is 
a tenderness of soul superior to that of his Creator ? 
Or, if he insist still in arguing on the ^materialistic 
basis, does he really believe that he has a sense of 
justice and impulse of good will beyond all that this 



THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 93 

great universe that moulded and cradled him pos- 
sesses, so that, if the universe could but wake up to 
consciousness for a moment, it would be astonished at 
the new and superior attributes that this human pygmy 
has attained to ? That would, indeed, be most colos- 
sal conceit. But, if we are not to puff ourselves out 
with such arrogance, then we must trust that there is 
some satisfactory explanation to this problem of evil, 
dark as it seems, — an explanation entirely consistent 
with God's goodness. 

And we can, in fact, see no little way into the 
enigma. Evil is only incidental, the scaffolding, 
shavings, and rubbish, as it were, of nature's building, 
all to be removed or utilized later on. No nerve is 
made on purpose to ache. The pain is but the danger- 
signal, to warn against more serious injuries. Disease, 
decay, and death are the accompaniment of laws 
that promote or guard life, — the autumn dropping of 
the leaves on the great cosmic tree, to prepare for the 
new growth and beauty of a more glorious spring- 
time. Man's passions, though the source of so large 
a part of his miseries, are yet the motor powers of all 
his social and moral progress, the channel of life, the 
physical basis of love and of all that is most precious 
in existence. 

Another great part of so-called evil is relative. 
Yesterday it was a good eagerly grasped. To all 
those below us in the social scale it is still a coveted 
boon. To the infinite vision, perhaps, that hardship 
which it works for us is but a blessing in disguise, a 
spur to drive us on to a still higher good. Again, 
take out of the world all the evil that is due to human 



94 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

agency, and how large a part would be gone ! But 
all this is plainly incidental to a greater good, — to our 
moral freedom and our ability to learn from experi- 
ence and be trained up in moral and spiritual excel- 
lence. Mr. Ingersoll himself has said, " If man could 
not suffer, the words i right ' and ' wrong ' would never 
have been spoken." Is the insentient creature, then, 
better than the moral man? Not so. The develop- 
ment of man's moral character, the refining of his 
spiritual personality, the development of pity and 
sympathy, virtue and self-sacrifice, would all have 
been impossible in a world where evil was unknown. 
Would that have been a better world than this ? I 
believe it would have been a worse world, — certainly, 
a far inferior world to this. Its peace would have 
been the peace of death. The development of the 
human soul is worth more than all the pain it costs, 
worth all the mistakes and sins through which it is 
reached. It is only in the furnace of affliction that 
the purest gold of character is refined. And no one 
who has ever borne suffering aright, who has under- 
stood its purpose as a process of spiritual purification 
and perfection, has complained that it was incom- 
patible with God's love to His children. To the ma- 
terialist who says " Death ends all," it may seem ex- 
cessive and useless. But where there is faith in a 
future life for which this is the training school, where 
there is believed to be an eternity of life in which God 
can make up to each soul for all it has suffered, and 
bring all this ooze and mud of earth to- its purposed 
blossoming in a heavenly clime, there this cloud of 
evil turns out its silver lining before the eye ; and we 



THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 95 

rejoice to see how " from seeming evil " God is ever 
" educing good, and, better yet again, in infinite 
progression." 

The great poet of English idealism has well spoken 
of " truths that wake to perish never." 

Amongst these eternal possessions of the human 
heart the foremost of all is the faith in the Divine 
Existence. Religion need have no real fear that that 
grand thought shall suffer any permanent eclipse. It 
is the light of all our seeing ; and they who think they 
deny Him but thrust aside some imperfect conception 
of Him, only to vindicate the Divine essence under 
some other guise. 

" I'm an atheist, thank God ! " cried a blundering 
boaster of his irreligion. And most denials of Deity 
testify in the very same breath to a like unconscious 
faith in the Inevitable One. If we cannot grasp Him, 
it is because He clasps us. If we cannot see Him, it 
is because He is the all-enveloping medium of mortal 
vision. If we fancy our prayers needless, it is because 
He has loved and blessed us already too much beyond 
our deserts. And in the very sigh of the weary soul 
that cannot find Him, He returns to assure us that we 
cannot lose Him, even if we would. 

It is true that all our inductions from observation, 
all the generalizations and inferences that nature 
authorizes, still fall short of giving us the attributes 
and the measure of the truly divine. 

We may reach by such scientific methods, to be- 
lief in a cosmic being who is indefinitely immense, 
but not infinite ; inconceivably enduring, but not 
eternal; wonderfully wise, but not omniscient; pure 



96 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

as our purest ideal, but not absolutely perfect ; vastly 
superhuman, but not supernatural; grand and ma- 
jestic, indeed, but still limited and finite. For, as we 
discern this Being only by His manifestations in the 
universe, we have no right to attribute to Him any- 
thing beyond the measure experienced in that universe ; 
and nowhere in the actual universe can we discern 
that which is absolutely unlimited, absolutely exempt 
from liability to imperfection. What warrant, then, 
have we for that infinitude, eternity, omniscience, and 
perfection that constitute the really divine attributes 
of God? 

Yes, I admit that the physical universe manifests 
nowhere these highest attributes of the divine. The 
knowledge of them is not to be drawn from the con- 
templation of nature. These are given, not by obser- 
vation or logical inference, but by intuition and 
spiritual suggestion, the more direct vision of the 
soul that sees beyond the boundary of actual or 
possible experience into the realm of pure truth. It 
is the straighter entrance into the mind, and the clear 
recognition by consciousness of that revealing light 
which God imparts to humanity. The warrant of the 
validity of these intuitions is the same that warrants 
the lower intuitions on which science is based, viz., 
their irrepressible existence, "their persistency in 
consciousness " ; " the inexplicability of their arising 
or continuing in our belief, unless corresponding to 
realities " (to use Spencer's criterion) ; " the complete 
satisfaction which is thus given to the' needs of the 
intellect " (to use Tyndall's test). If our ultimate and 
necessary belief in the persistence of force, the inde- 



THE AGNOSTIC'S DIFFICULTIES 97 

structibility of matter, and the uniformity of nature 
be good proof of these basic laws of science (and re- 
member : they are the only proof there is of them) ; 
if the inexpugnable consciousness of the existence of 
an ultimate reality behind appearance establish that 
grand truth (as Herbert Spencer tells us it does, and 
founds his whole system of evolution on it); if the 
fulfilment of the desire of the reason which the lumi- 
niferous ether gives should be accepted as good evi- 
dence for its reality (as Professor Tyndall tells the 
world it should) ; why is not the same kind of proof 
valid evidence for these spiritual truths, these higher 
attributes of the divine nature? Certainly, no one 
who accepts the current theories or the established 
principles of science can rightly object to the 
reasoning. 

And if by the rigid methods of induction, starting 
from the widest observation and proceeding by the 
most rigorous logic, we can lay the scientific founda- 
tions of religion in the existence of a Being incon- 
ceivably immense and enduring, grand as the universe, 
beneficent and pure as our highest ideal, wise and 
majestic beyond all standards of human wisdom or 
material majesty, then we have all that is needed for 
humanity's worshipful instincts ; and we may properly 
expand this divine ideal in the glow of imagination to 
that infinite and absolute plenitude of eternal per- 
fection that is required for the complete satisfaction 
alike of the adoring heart and the thinking reason. 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE SCIENTIFIC VALIDITY OF OUR RELIGIOUS 
INSTINCTS. 

In the history of religion there is nothing more 
astonishing, both to its friends and its foes, than the 
ineffectiveness of the heaviest argumentative bombard- 
ments in driving out faith in spiritual things from the 
stronghold of popular belief. When the agnostic 
peruses some new critique of the theistic argument or 
the latest examination of the belief in a future life, he 
throws his hat in the air in exultation, confident that 
the superstition cannot survive such another fatal ex- 
posure, and timid Christians themselves turn pale with 
apprehension of the coming downfall of the church. 
But when, the nine days' wonder over, the new dia- 
lectical or scientific cannonade has passed by, the flag 
of Christian trust and hope is seen floating as jubi- 
lantly as ever over the ancient walls. The wise come 
to a recognition of the truth that it was not chiefly by 
logical or scientific scaling-ladders that man has 
mounted to the heights of religious conviction, and 
therefore that it avails little to pull them away. 

That from which religion ever wells up afresh from 
age to age is the spiritual capacity of humanity, 
sensitive to the subtile touches of the unseen world 
and the indwelling divine life. The laws of thought, 
within whose narrow circle logic is confined, make it 
98 



VALIDITY OF OUR RELIGIOUS INSTINCTS 99 

difficult, if not impossible, to prove satisfactorily not 
a few of the propositions of theism. Nevertheless the 
forces of feeling and the tides of life, which are ever 
pressing us over the logical boundary-lines towards the 
Infinite, keep the sacred beliefs of religion perennially 
alive. Against all the subtilties of the dialecticians, 
in the face of all the discoveries of the scientists, the 
heart makes its undying protests. However little, in 
strictness of logic, we may be able to prove, the faiths 
of our higher nature remain with us, and we say, with 
England's poet laureate : 

" I think we are not wholly brain, 
Magnetic mockeries ; not in vain 
Like Paul with beasts, I fought with death ; 

" Not only cunning casts in clay ; 

Let science prove we are, and then 
What matters science unto men ? 
At least to me, I would not stay. 

" Let him the wiser man who springs 
Hereafter, up from childhood shape 
His action like the greater ape ; 
But I was born to other things." 

Such is the flat defiance of the heart to the worst 
that logical analysis or physical investigation can do. 

Now, to the scientific man this seems sheer senti- 
mentalism. In his opinion we have no business (the 
religious man no more than any one else) to introduce 
the agitations of the emotions to disturb the con- 
clusions of the intellect. " Every one," says Biichner, 
" may, of course, have convictions of the heart ; but to 
mix them up with philosophical questions is unscien- 

L.oiC. 



100 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

tific." The only question that the scientific world 
will admit as pertinent, in reference to the acceptance 
of a theory, is the question of its truth or falsehood. 
If a theory accords with reason or experience, then it 
is true and is to be accepted. If it does not so accord, 
then it is not true, and is to be rejected. The ques- 
tion of its pleasantness or unpleasantness to one's 
tastes, prepossessions, or instincts is not to be consid- 
ered for a moment. 

Now, to this demand for the pure truth, the simple 
fact, I entirely assent, and I say that religion also 
must assent. Truth is her sovereign, quite as much 
as that of science. It is " they that are of the truth/' 
said Christ, that " hear my voice." The true Christian 
disciple is known by his allegiance to the genuine and 
the real, by the earnestness with which he seeks to 
conform his thought and faith to the actualities of the 
world. For a people that calls itself Christian to 
make pleasant falsities the objects of its worship, and 
" make-believe " the staple of its religion, would be 
the saddest spectacle the sun anywhere could shine 
upon. Truth, however distasteful, is better than the 
sweet poison of delusion. 

I accept truth, then, i. e. y the evidence of the facts, 
as the one thing which should determine our faiths. 
But does this require that we should straightway dis- 
miss all the instincts of the heart as incompetent to 
testify at all in religious things, and admit to the judi- 
cial balances only stone fossils and iced syllogisms ? 
Grant that truth is the one decisive thing, and the 
question arises at once : What is truth, and how can 
you determine it ? The moment that you advance to 



VALIDITY OF OUR RELIGIOUS INSTINCTS 101 

the determination of this question : " What is truth ? " 
you must recognize that there are many questions in 
which the accord or the discord of the theory with 
our native constitution is a most weighty considera- 
tion in determining what truth is. 

Facts are, indeed, what we must follow ; but lumps 
of matter and vibratory motions, pressed plants and 
ticketed beetles are not the only facts in existence. 
The inextinguishable longings of the human soul, 
from which religions spring, are also facts, and as 
good testimonies and signs in determining truth as 
bug or polyp is. Even in relation to a spider or a bee, 
statements in regard to their form, weight, color, and 
other material characteristics are not the only scien- 
tific facts of importance. The naturalist must record, 
as matter of equal or greater gravity, their mental 
qualities, the tastes of the one for insect prey, of the 
other for honey ; the instinct of the one to spin its 
webs, of the other to build and stock its cells ; the 
varied impulses that move each in their different ways 
of providing for the perpetuation of their respective 
species. 

So, in regard to man, a knowledge of his immaterial 
characteristics is still more essential to a full scientific 
knowledge of him than a knowledge of his material 
qualities. His desires and longings ; those higher im- 
pulses that move him to acts which are incompre- 
hensible, if his being is interpreted as a purely ma- 
terial one; those universal intuitions which are the 
very condition of observation and the justification of 
all reasoning, yet which pass quite beyond the strict 
boundaries of either logic or empiricism, these are the 



102 THE NEW WORLD AND TEE NEW THOUGHT 

most important of all facts about him. And not only- 
are they facts, but they are facts that speak of more 
than the character of their possessor. They are facts 
that disclose also the nature of the world in which he 
lives, and the nature of the beings with whom he is 
connected. 

Recall for a moment a few analogies. The building 
propensity which urges the tamed beaver, kept in a 
house, to strive continually to construct dams, would 
assure us, (did we never directly observe the fact), of 
the flowing stream, which is the creature's native 
haunt. The groping of the new-born lamb for the 
mother's dugs speaks plainly of the food there, meet 
for the satisfaction of its craving. The sexual appetite 
implies the answering sex; and the bird's nest-building 
and brooding instinct is prophetic of the coming gen- 
eration, and correspondent to its needs. Every part in 
nature, having been moulded by the whole, speaks of 
that whole, and bids us believe that whatever is needed 
as its complement exists somewhere and somehow. 
If no telescope had yet revealed Neptune, neverthe- 
less, the need of that additional planet to explain the 
perturbations of Uranus would assure astronomers of 
its existence. When an Agassiz discovers, on the 
summit of some mountain, thousands of miles from 
the sea, the remains of creatures with gills and fins and 
swimming-bladder, he is sure of the existence in that 
region, at some past period, of the lake or sea to whose 
aquatic environment these organs are correlated. Why 
so ? Simply because these creatures needed this watery 
element for the use of the organs with which we see 
them endowed. 



VALIDITY OF OUR RELIGIOUS INSTINCTS 103 

This is the customary method of scientific reasoning, 
a. guiding principle of discovery in nature, viz., that 
nowhere in the world do we find a permanent general 
need in a living species unless there exists some supply 
adjusted to it. There is not a naturalist who thinks 
of disputing this, or who, if he did, could make a step 
of progress in his knowledge of ancient times. 

Now, this same law holds in the realm of human exist- 
ence. Whatever needs man's soul feels, whatever im- 
pulses are native to his spirit, whatever insights his spirit- 
ual vision can attain to, give evidence as to the real na- 
ture of the world in which he was developed and the real 
agency of the operations going on about him, equally 
significant and valid as the laws which the senses indi- 
cate or to which the reason testifies. 

But just here the scientific objector would doubtless 
interpose, and ask us if we are acquainted with the 
epoch-making work of Mr. Darwin and Mr. Spencer, 
and if we think that, in view of their discoveries, this 
argument still has force. Mr. Darwin and Mr. Spencer, 
our scientific friends assure us, have shown conclusively 
that instinct and intuition are mere products of multi- 
tudinous ancestral experiences, accumulated and fused 
into these seemingly different things by the combined 
action of habit, association of ideas, and heredity. 
Though in the individual they may seem innate, in 
the race they are not so, but are results of its experi- 
ence ; they are developments of low, gross impulses, 
and therefore are not worthy to be taken as witnesses 
to the fundamental truths of religion. 

Suppose we grant this origin of our cravings, 
instincts, and intuitions. Let our highest intuitions 



104 THE NEW WORLD AND TEE NEW THOUGHT 

and aspirations, all the most delicate forms of the con- 
scious life of to-day, be regarded as but the accumu- 
lated principal and interest of all that has been felt or 
known by every organism in the ascending line, from 
the primordial life-cell up to man. Grant all this, and 
what is the consequence? Does it overthrow the 
validity of our instinctive feelings and intuitive ideas ; 
or, rather, does it not solidly establish them ? 

For what are the principles ruling in this develop- 
ment of the soul ? First and foremost, the principle 
of adjustment of the inner to the outer, of the mental 
to the material. The very definition of life given by 
Herbert Spencer is, " the continuous adjustment of 
internal relations to external relations." We dis- 
tinguish between a live object and a dead one, 
Spencer points out, by noticing whether a change in 
its conditions will be followed by a change in the 
object itself. Stir it with a stick, or shout at it, and 
its immobility or its action tells us whether it is inani- 
mate or animate. In the living organism, not only is 
there always some response to the outside world and its 
events, but there is a fitting response. The rumina- 
ting organs correspond to a flora of herbs and grass. 
The stinging contractile power of a polyp's tentacles 
corresponds, says Spencer, to the sensitiveness and 
strength of the creatures serving it for prey. Accord- 
ing to the need for more varied and more rapid 
adjustment of the internal relations to the outer 
relations, the inward organs are more and more com- 
plicated and efficient. The degree of life varies as the 
degree of correspondence, from the seaweed in its 
simple environment up to infinitely complex man, in 



VALIDITY OF OUB RELIGIOUS INSTINCTS 105 

his infinitely varied circumstances. Wherever there 
is a gap between the inner and the outer relations, 
there the organism modifies itself to fit the circum- 
stances, and to close up the gap. The touch of nature 
upon the living creature, and the response of life to 
that physical impress, moulds the two into harmony. 
The fur-clad northern animal sheds its fur in the south. 
The creature from a warm climate, thinly clad or 
naked, develops, in a colder zone, a warmer clothing. 
The greyhound, brought to the rarefied air of the 
Mexican table-land, unable in the first generation to 
exert itself as usual without panting and exhaustion, 
in the second generation unfolds a new breathing 
capacity, and regains the speed, characteristic of the 
species. Spencer's and Darwin's works form a treasury 
of illustrations of this continual adjustment of the or- 
ganism to its environment. It is the very condition 
of the creature's existence, says Mr. Darwin, that he 
shall exactly fit himself to the world about him. Death 
to his species, in the struggle for existence, is the sure 
penalty for not thus fitting himself to the facts of the 
world. He cannot carry any load of useless organ or 
faculty, or the extra weight will cause him to lose the 
race. As soon as an organ is no longer of use, it 
begins to shrivel and tends to degeneration and 
extinction. Mr. Darwin challenged the production 
of an instance where any organ, absolutely without 
use in the struggle for life, continued for any length 
of time to be fully developed. 

Such, then, is the first great principle that governs 
in the evolution of life, viz., that life is constantly and 
necessarily correspondent to the universe without. 



106 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

Now, apply this to the question of religion, and what 
is its bearing ? Only a new and stronger confirmation 
of our position, that the innate idea bespeaks an ob- 
jective reality corresponding to it. The persistent 
inward state, the constant moral and spiritual needs 
of man, his ever-renewed beliefs (whatever they are), 
inform us of the persistent outward fact to which they 
are correlated. For did the external reality not exist, 
the inward adjustment never would have arisen. Or, 
if by some chance it had come into existence, then, 
having no correspondent object to sustain, renew, and 
keep it true, it must, under the influence of the 
equilibrating tendencies, either pass away or shift its 
form, until it reached a state of natural equilibrium 
with its environment. 

Or, take the other great principle of the develop- 
ment theory, that of descent or heredity. Suppose, 
as this theory asks us to believe, that our religious 
intuitions and our moral sense are only refinements of 
our social instincts ; and that these are but modifica- 
tions of lower brute impulses ; and these, again, have 
been derived and transformed, somehow, out of the 
attractions, repulsions, and other activities common to 
all matter and force. Nay, we will suppose the truth 
even of Professor Huxley's theory, that we are really 
only automata, that our feelings, thoughts, and aspira- 
tions are necessary results of the sum of motions of 
matter and impulses of force in the midst of which 
they arise. We will look upon that which we call the 
soul as formed gradually from the necessary interaction 
of nature's energies ; not as an existence of a different 
kind and substance, but only a subtler product of the 



VALIDITY OF OUR RELIGIOUS INSTINCTS 107 

cosmic forces, risen thus to consciousness. What fol- 
lows, then? Is the logical result not this, that if we 
inherit from the material world itself, its laws must be 
registered not only in our bodies but in our minds ? 
Our consciousness, on this theory, is but the liberation 
of the dumb life and reason of the cosmos. The laws 
of the mind are its laws, precisely because they were 
beforehand the laws of that greater whole, nature, of 
which mind is but a more specialized part. A con- 
stant association in the heart's instincts and wants im- 
plies a constant association in the outer world. 

The logical connection is a necessary one. For on 
this automaton theory of the mind no free-will can 
disturb the necessary and proper conclusion. The 
general laws of the mind, the universal beliefs of man, 
whatever they are, must result from the primitive facts 
of the universe, with as little chance of error as in the 
calculations of a calculating machine from the data 
with which it starts. 

If, then, this human sensibility of ours, the first 
conscious expression of the hidden life forces of the 
universe, should shrink from such an idea as that of a 
personal God, and turn instinctively to views such as 
are offered us by the materialists, then, I admit, we 
ought to reject religion as false and accept atheism as 
true. But if, on the contrary, this inner force of 
nature, when liberated and expressed in the conscious- 
ness of humanity, with one general voice should be 
found confessing its natural belief in a creative mind ; 
if, in its heart of hearts, it feels daily the need for such 
an object of worship and trust, and recoils with an 
unconquerable aversion from every godless theory, 



108 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

then we have, in such testimony of the heart, sound 
logical proof of the facts to which these instincts of 
the heart correspond. They testify to the existence, 
as facts in the encircling universe, of those grand 
realities which, by iterated and reiterated impressions 
on the plastic organization of man, have stamped upon 
it these ineffaceable ideas. If the thought of infinity 
is indispensable in the ideal world, then it is an essen- 
tial element in the real world. If we feel universally 
a power within ourselves, urging us to righteousness, 
then we know there is a power, not ourselves, working 
for that same righteousness. 

Do we find faith in a perfect wisdom impressed on 
the sensitive tablets of our souls ? Then there is im- 
plied, in that grand cosmic die that formed the im- 
press, an equally infallible intelligence. Do we find, 
again, within the evolved microcosm, man, an insati- 
able hunger for a fuller love and an imperative need 
of a more helpful sympathy than man can give? 
Then we may be sure that without, in the macrocosm 
that evolved the human miniature, there is the divine 
affection corresponding thereto. 

To ask, then, in regard to any theory proposed for 
our acceptance, whether or not it is in harmony with 
our natural instincts, is not an illogical sentimentalism, 
but a consideration of real weight in deciding whether 
or not it is to be accepted as true. The instincts of 
the heart, the intuitions of the mind, the aversions and 
longings of the soul, afford indications, not to be over- 
looked by any careful reasoner, as to the great realities 
in the cosmos which have shaped and moulded them. 
The latest scientific theories, instead of invalidating 



VALIDITY OF OUR RELIGIOUS INSTINCTS 109 

such testimony, approve its competency. Let us, 
then, turn to human nature, and see what its testimony 
really is. 

Is human nature adapted to atheism or to theism ? 
Do materialistic theories or religious convictions best 
satisfy the human heart ? These questions need but a 
brief consideration, so preponderantly do the facts all 
lie on one side. The whole history of humanity testi- 
fies to its religious tendencies and adaptations, and the 
violence to its highest instincts which every anti- 
religious system offers. In every human soul there is 
a thirst for something above all that the senses can 
give. There is an attraction to the infinite and per- 
fect, and a groping after the sight and knowledge of 
it. The dimmest shadows of this Infinite Being fill 
man with awe and reverence. Impelled by sacred im- 
pulses, often scarcely understood, but still urging him 
on, man bows in worship to the holy mystery. As 
the schoolhouse exhibits man's desire for knowledge 
and the court-house his sense of justice, so the edifice 
of prayer and praise, holiest structure in every land, 
witnesses to the religious instinct in man. It matters 
not what different forms these may have, the stone 
circle of the Druid or the Pagoda of China, the mosque 
of Islam or the cathedral of Christianity ; they all give 
testimony to the same worshipping instinct. 

It will be objected, perhaps, that this religious wave 
is but a mere product of superstition, arising from ig- 
norance of the laws of nature, and fear engendered by 
them. 

If it be a superstition, it is one shared by the most 
enlightened philosophers and men of science. A 



110 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

Bacon, a Leibnitz, a Pascal, a Locke, each has been its 
champion. A Herschel, a Newton, a Liebig, an 
Agassiz, a Faraday, each has owned its sway. It is 
the testimony of Professor Maudsley, a man by no 
means prejudiced in favor of religion, that " there is 
hardly one, if, indeed, there be even one, eminent in- 
quirer who has denied the existence of God, while 
there is notably more than one who has evinced a 
childlike simplicity of faith." 

There are, of course, some individuals and probably 
in the lowest ranks of humanity there may be one or 
two whole tribes (although the latest investigations 
tend to disprove this), without any trace of the relig- 
ious sentiment. So there are men who are color 
blind. So there are tribes who cannot count above 
ten, or discern the simplest musical discords or con- 
cords. But this does not prove the non-existence of 
color, harmonies of sound, or distinctions of number. 
It shows only in these men the undeveloped state of 
their natures and faculties. Neither do the few excep- 
tions to the grand hymn of praise and prayer, lifted 
by man to God, disprove at all the native adaptation 
of man to religion, and his need of it. The worst un- 
believers have yet had their beliefs. Accepted forms 
of theologic statements have been rudely uprooted by 
them, but the irrepressible religious sense has blos- 
somed in each with some new faith of the man's own. 

The Jew who was excommunicated in Holland as 
the most negative of infidels was but so " intoxicated 
with God," as wiser minds afterwards saw,'that he could 
walk in no narrow ecclesiastical path and see the Di- 
vine under no one nor threefold form. The represent- 



VALIDITY OF OUE RELIGIOUS INSTINCTS 111 

ative scoffer of the eighteenth century, leader and 
mouthpiece of the disbelief of the French Revolution, 
built at his home in Ferney a chapel with the inscrip- 
tion ; " Deo erexit Voltaire." The anathematized 
Tom Paine begins that " Age of Reason " which has 
been called a very Gospel of Unbelief, with this out- 
spoken creed : " I believe in one God and no more 
and I look for happiness beyond this life." 

Auguste Comte reasoned out a grand scheme which 
he called The Positive Philosophy, recognizing only 
phenomena, their coexistence and succession, and 
ruling out of court the very existence of God or the 
soul as the idle fancies of the world's childhood. But 
when he had finished it, — lo ! one day he met a 
woman who awoke the heart slumbering within him. 
His beloved Clotilde revealed to him a law higher 
than self-interest, the law of love and worship ; and he 
had to graft on to his system such sort of religion as 
was still possible after the immortal and the infinite 
had been ruled out. A makeshift Deity was impro- 
vised out of " Collective Humanity," and two hours a 
day, divided into three private services were to be 
spent in the adoration of this " Grand Being," under 
the form of a mother with her child in her arms. 
The image of the fair idol, dress, posture, everything, 
was to be brought distinctly to mind, and the whole 
soul was to be prostrated in her honor. 

With such chaff will the spirit of man seek to sat- 
isfy its spiritual hunger when legitimate food is 
denied it ! 

Suppose that we knew two young men, starting out 
on the career of life, in the flush of youthful energy. 



112 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

One of them has a clear, strong faith in the immortal 
soul within him and the all wise and all holy God 
above, and has determined to live as these beliefs dic- 
tate to him that he should live. The other is destitute 
entirely of religious faith and has made up his mind, 
also, to act in accordance with his Atheistic opinions. 

Of which would any one have the brightest expecta- 
tions? Which life, by its usefulness, its contented- 
ness, its integrity and nobility would show itself in 
conformity with the laws and forces of nature? 

In such a situation, is there any uncertainty as to 
the verdict ? 

Suppose a statesman, founding a new state, should 
take as its foundation stones, principles like these : 
" No belief in God or a future state is to be tolerated 
under this government ; no worship of any superhu- 
man being is to be allowed ; all efforts at spiritual per- 
fection, or the gratification of the religious sentiments, 
are to be as far as possible suppressed; men must 
remember that they are but more-developed brutes, 
and each must look out for his own gratification and 
the furtherance of his self-interest. ,, Who would be 
wild enough to expect to make a nation live and pros- 
per on such a basis ? As Robespierre told the French 
Jacobins with reference to this very point : " If there 
were no God in existence, it would be necessary to the 
national well-being to invent one." 

Or take but a few of the common test experiences 
of life. When the sobbing wife looks upon the grave 
of the beloved partner of her life ; when the young 
man is sore beset by the seductions of unlawful pas- 
sion ; when the martyr to truth sees the blazing pyre 



VALIDITY OF OUR RELIGIOUS INSTINCTS 113 

staring him in the face, unless he will forswear his 
honest convictions — which is it that in such crises best 
meets the needs of the heart ? Which is it that re- 
sponds to any man's sense of fitness or justice ? To 
know that this world is the kingdom of an Almighty- 
God, whose attributes are those of wisdom, love, and 
holiness, a God who will conquer finally all evil, help 
the struggling, and reward the upright, if not here, 
then in a more blessed hereafter; or, on the other 
hand, to believe that " the universe is simply an end- 
less coil of antecedents and consequents, unwinding 
from the drum of time by unchangeable law ; a mon- 
strous engine of matter and force, grinding on re- 
morselessly, caring not whom it kills, utterly unguided, 
unheeding, unknowing " ? Can any one doubt which 
of these answers alone corresponds to the native in- 
stincts of man ? Can any reasonable mind be uncer- 
tain as to which answer is adjusted to the characteristic 
features of humanity, which have been impressed on 
the heart of man by the grand seal of nature ? 

Some half century ago a German writer published 
a piece of verse which began in this way : " Our 
hearts are oppressed with the emotions of a pious 
sadness at the thought of the ancient Jehovah who is 
preparing to die." 

The verses were a dirge upon the death of the liv- 
ing God' who was soon, as the author believed, to 
perish jirom the belief of reason ; and the author, like 
a well-educated son of the nineteenth century, be- 
stowed a few poetic tears upon the obsequies of the 
eternal. 

There are men at the present day to whom likewise 



114 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

there is no longer any God, and who do not even 
affect the politeness of making any lament, but openly 
exult over their discovery. 

But ah ! if that should indeed be true ! What a 
funeral pall would it throw over human life ! How 
would it strip existence of its highest aspirations and 
sweetest consolations ! 

Science and culture I know, have given us wonder- 
ful gifts and have made marvelous discoveries. 

But what thoughtful man will dare to say that they 
have so taken the place of faith in providing for man 
that religion is of no more use, in these modern days ? 

What thoughtful man will say that either modern 
culture or modern science can fill the hearts of its 
votaries with more sincere joyfulness than the hearts 
of David or Paul or the humblest true Christians have 
held? 

What thoughtful man will dare to say that any or 
all of our modern inventions, our patent appliances 
and boasted sources of enlightenment can do more to 
make a household contented, or can turn out better, 
sweeter, higher-minded men and women than religion 
with its old-fashioned beliefs and principles ? 

And if science and culture cannot do this, — most 
certainly they can never take the place of religion. 

Remove science and all its admirable discoveries 
from our modern world, and humanity would indeed 
be thrust far backward on the path of progress, in 
straits of daily inconvenience, thoroughly uncomforta- 
ble even to imagine. 

But expel religion from the world and humanity 
would miss something still more indispensable. Hu- 



VALIDITY OF OUR RELIGIOUS INSTINCTS 115 

manity would suffer the most irreparable of all losses. 
It would lose the ideals which led it on, the strength 
in which it faced difficulties and obloquies ; the hopes 
that have consoled it in every trial and bereavement. 

There are moments certainly in every one's life when 
those, fullest stocked with learning, feel themselves as 
benighted as the most illiterate ; when they look in 
vain to all their science and culture to furnish a gleam 
of light or hope to illuminate the gloom. 

Hear the confession of a German satirist (who had 
thrown as many bitter mockeries at religion as any 
man of his generation) in regard to his personal ex- 
periences as he stood at the bedside of his dying 
mother. 

" I thought over," said Heinrich Heine, " all the 
great and the little inventions of man, — the Doctrine 
of Souls, Newton's System of Attraction, The Uni- 
versal German Library, the Genera Plantarum, the 
Calculus Infinitorum, the Magister Matheseos, the 
Right and the Oblique Ascension of the Stars and 
their Parallaxes ; but nothing would answer. And 
she lay out of reach, lay on the brink and was going, 
and I could not even see where she would fall. Then 
I commended her to God, and went out and composed 
a prayer for the dying, that she might read it. She 
was my mother ; and she had always loved me so 
dearly ; and this was all that I could do for her." 

" We are not great ; and our happiness is that we can 
believe in something greater and better." 

Such is the indispensable need of God felt by the 
human heart, even by such inveterate jesters as a 
Heine. 



116 THE NEW WORLD AND TEE NEW THOUGHT ' 

Such are the religious instincts of man, not to be 
denied without working deepest misery and mischief. 
Now, whichever of the two opposite theories of the 
formation of these natural needs and instincts we 
adopt; whether we say, as the theist has formerly 
done, that they are formed by God Himself, or 
whether we take the position of the evolutionists, that 
they are formed by the persistent moulding power of 
nature over the individual, by the reiterated impres- 
sions upon successive generations of the surrounding 
universe (continuous correspondence with which is 
the very condition and essence both of life and mind) 
— on either theory it is impossible to believe that 
these God-desiring impulses are contradictions of the 
reality of nature. Can it be thought for a moment, 
that these inborn affirmations of the soul within man, 
and of the over-soul without him, are organized 
delusions on the part of nature, are falsehoods per- 
sistently renewed by the universe in the formation of 
every fresh organism ? To believe that were suicidal 
to all reasoning, to every system of thought. But if 
that be incredible, if that cannot be accepted, there is 
no alternative except to recognize in this universal 
outcry of heart and flesh for the living God, in this in- 
stinctive faith in spiritual things, ever springing up 
afresh, however much it may be trampled upon, a sure 
attestation of the infinite and eternal realities cor- 
respondent to them. 



CHAPTER V. 

EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY. 

In the life and letters of Charles Darwin there is a 
memorandum copied from his pocket note-book of 
1837, to this effect. " In July, opened my first note- 
book on Transmutation of Species. Had been greatly 
struck with the character of the South American 
fossils and the species on Galapagos Archipelago." 

These facts, he says, were the origin of all his epoch- 
making views as to the development of life and the 
work of natural selection in evolving species. 

His first suspicions that species were not immutable 
and made at one cast, directly by the fiat of the 
Creator, seemed to him, at the outset, he says, 
" almost like murder!' 

To the greater part of the church, when in 1859 
after twenty years of work, in accumulating the proofs 
of his theory, he at last gave it to the world, it seemed 
quite as bad as murder. 

It is very interesting now, to look back upon the 
history and career of the Darwinian theory in the last 
forty years ; to recall, first, the fierce outcry and de- 
nunciation it elicited ; then, the gradual accumulation 
of corroboratory evidence from all quarters in its 
favor ; the accession of one scientific authority after 
another to the new views ; the softening little by 
little, of ecclesiastical opposition ; its gradual accept 

117 



118 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

ance by the broad-minded, alike in theological and 
scientific circles; then in these recent years, the ex- 
altation of the new theory into a scientific and phil- 
osophic creed, wherein matter, force and evolution 
constitute the New Trinity, which unless the modern 
man piously believes, he becomes anathematized and 
excommunicated by all the priests of the new dog- 
matism. 

In the field of science, undoubtedly, evolution has 
won the day. Nevertheless, in religious circles, old 
time prejudices and slow conservatism, clinging to its 
creeds, as the hermit crab clings to the cast off shell 
of oyster or clam, still resist it. The great body of 
the Christian laity, looks askance on it. And even in 
this progressive American country, one of the largest 
and most liberal of American denominations not long 
ago tried and condemned one of its clergy for heresy, 
on account of the publication of a book, in which the 
principles of evolution are frankly adopted and applied 
to Christianity. For a man to call himself a Christian 
evolutionist, is, (we have been told by high orthodox 
authority) a contradiction in terms. 

I think it is safe to say to-day, that evolution has 
come to stay. It is too late to turn it out of the man- 
sions of modern thought. And it is therefore a vital 
question, " can belief in God and the soul and divine 
revelation abide under the same roof in peace ? Or 
must Christianity vacate the realm of modern thought 
and leave it to the chilling frosts of materialism and 
skepticism ? 

Now, if I have been able to understand the issue 
and its grounds, there is no such alternative, — no such 



EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY 119 

incompatibility between evolution and Christianity. 
There is, I know, a form of evolution and a form of 
Christianity which are mutually contradictory. There 
is a form of evolution which is narrowly materialistic. 
It dogmatically asserts that there is nothing in exist- 
ence but matter and physical forces and the iron laws 
according to which they develop. Life, according to 
this school, is only a product of the happy combi- 
nation of the atoms ; feeling and thought are but the 
iridescence of the brain-tissues ; conscience but a 
transmuted form of ancestral fears and expediencies. 
Soul, revelation, providence are nothing but illusions 
of the childish fancy of humanity. Opposed to this 
materialism and fighting with all the intensity of those 
who fight for their very life, stands a school of Chris- 
tians who maintain that unless the special creation of 
species, by Divine fiat, and the frequent intervention 
of God and His angels in the world be admitted, re- 
ligion has received its death wound. According to 
this school, unless the world was created in six days, 
and Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, and 
Hezekiah turned the solar shadow back on the dial, 
and Jesus was born without human father, and unless 
some new miracle will interfere with the regular course 
of law, of rain and dew, of sickness and health, of 
cause and effect, whenever a believer lifts up his voice 
in prayer, — why then, the very foundations of religion 
are destroyed. 

Now, of course, between a Christianity and an evo- 
lutionism of this sort, there is an irreconcilable con- 
flict. But it is because neither of them is a fair, 
rational or true form of thought. When the principle 



120 THE NEW WOULD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

of evolution is properly comprehended and ex- 
pounded ; when Christianity is interpreted in the light 
that history and philosophy require, the two will be 
found to have no difficulty in joining hands. Though 
a purely naturalistic evolutionism may ignore God; 
and a purely supernatural religion may have no room 
for evolution, a natural religion and a rational evolu- 
tion may yet harmoniously unite in a higher and more 
fruitful marriage. Let us only recognize evolution by 
the Divine Spirit, as the process of God's working in 
the world, and we then have a theory which has a 
place and a function, at once for all that the newest 
science has to teach and the most venerable faith 
needs to retain. 

In the first place, evolution is not itself a cause ; it 
is no force in itself. It has no originating power. It 
is simply a method and law of the occurrence of 
things. Evolution shows that all things proceed, 
little by little, without breach of continuity ; that the 
higher ever proceeds from the lower ; the more com- 
plex ever unfolds from the more simple. For every 
species or form, it points out some ancestor or natural 
antecedent, from which by gradual modification, it has 
been derived. And in natural selection, in the influ- 
ences of the environment, in sexual selection, use and 
disuse, sterility, and the variability of the organism, 
science shows us some of the secondary factors or 
conditions of this development. But none of these are 
supposed by it to be first causes or originating powers. 
What these are, science itself does not claim to declare* 

Now, it is true, that this unbroken course of de- 
velopment; and this omnipresent reign of law are in- 



EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY 121 

consistent with the theological theories of supernatural 
interventions that have so often claimed a monopoly 
of faith. But independent of all scientific reasons, — 
on religious and philosophical grounds themselves, 
this dogmatic view is no longer to be accepted. For 
if God be the God of all-seeing wisdom and foresight 
that reverence conceives Him to be, His work should 
be too perfect from the outset to demand such changes 
of plan and order of working. The great miracle of 
miracles, as Isaac Taylor used to say — is that " Provi- 
dence needs no miracles to carry out its all perfect 
plans." 

But if, I hear it asked, — if the huge machine of the 
universe thus grinds on and has ever ground on, 
without interruption ; if every event is closely bound 
to its physical antecedent ; life to cell ; mind to brain, 
man to his animal ancestry and bodily conditions, — 
what other result will there be than an inevitable sur- 
render of materialism? When Laplace was asked by 
Napoleon, on presenting to him his famous essay on 
the nebular hypothesis of the origin of the stellar 
universe — " Why do I see here no mention of the 
Deity," — the French astronomer proudly replied — 
" Sire, I have no need of that hypothesis." Is not 
that the natural lesson of evolutionism, — to say that 
God is an hypothesis, no longer needed by science, 
and which progressive thought, therefore, better dis- 
miss ? I do not think so. Old time materialism dis- 
missed the idea of God because it dismissed the idea 
of a beginning. The forces and phenomena of the 
world were supposed eternal and therefore a Creator 
was unnecessary. But the conception of evolution is 



122 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

radically different. It is a movement, that demands a 
motor force behind it. It is a movement moreover, 
that according to the testimony of modern science, 
cannot have been eternal. The modern theory of 
heat and the dissipation of energy requires that our 
solar system and the nebula from which it sprang 
should have had a beginning in some finite period of 
time. The evolutionary process cannot have been 
going on forever; for the amount of heat and the 
number of degrees of temperature and the rate of 
cooling, are all finite, calculable quantities, and there- 
fore the process cannot have been going on for more 
than a certain finite number of years, — more or less 
millions, say. Moreover, if the original fire-mist was 
perfectly homogeneous, and not impelled into motion 
by any external force, it would never have begun to 
rotate and evolve into planets and worlds. If per- 
fectly homogeneous, it would have remained always 
balanced and always immobile. To start it on its 
course of rotation and evolution, there must have been 
either some external impelling power, or else some 
original differentiation of forces, for which again some 
cause, other than itself must be supposed. For the 
well-known law of inertia forbids that any material 
system that is in absolute equilibrium should spon- 
taneously start itself into motion. As John Stuart 
Mill admitted — " the laws of nature can give no 
account of their own origin." 

In the second place, notice that the materialistic 
interpretation of evolution fails to account for that 
which is most characteristic in the process ; the steady 
progress it reveals. 



EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY 123 

Were evolution an aimless, fruitless motion, rising 
and falling alternately, or moving round and round in 
an endless circle, the reference of these motions to the 
blind forces of matter, might have perhaps a certain 
plausibility. But the movements of the evolution 
process are of quite a different character; they are 
not chaotic ; they are no barren, useless circlings back 
to the same point, again and again. They are progress- 
ive ; and if often they seem to return to their point 
of departure, we see, on close examination, that the 
return is always on a higher plane. The motion is a 
spiral one, ever advancing to loftier and loftier ranges. 

Now this progressive motion is something that no 
accidental play of the atoms will account for. For 
chance builds no such rational structures ; chance 
writes no such intelligent dramas, with orderly be- 
ginning, crescendo and climax. Or if some day, 
chance builds a structure with some show of order in 
it, to-morrow it pulls it down. It does not move 
steadily forward with permanent constructions. 

The further science penetrates into the secrets of 
the universe the more regular seems the march of 
thought presented there; the more harmonious the 
various parts ; the more rational the grand system 
that is discovered. " How the one force of the uni- 
verse should have pursued the pathway of evolution 
through the lapse of millions of ages, leaving traces 
so legible by intelligence to-day, unless from begin- 
ning to end the whole process had been dominated by 
intelligence," has well been said to pass the limits of 
conjecture. The all luminous intelligibility of the 
universe is the all sufficient proof of the intelligence 



124 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

of the cause that produced it. In the annals of sci- 
ence there is nothing more curious than the prophetic 
power which those savans have gained who have 
grasped this secret of nature — the rationality of the 
universe. It was by this confidence in finding in the 
hitherto unexplained domains of nature what reason 
demanded, that Goethe, from the analogies of the 
mammalian skeleton discovered the intermaxillary 
bone in man; and Sir William Hamilton from the 
mathematical consequences of the undulation of light 
led the way to the discovery of conical refraction. 

A similar story is told of Professor Agassiz and 
Professor Pierce, the one, the great zoologist, the 
other the great mathematician of Harvard University. 
Agassiz, having studied the formation of radiate ani- 
mals and having found them all referable to three 
different plans of structure, asked Professor Pierce, 
without informing him of his discovery, how to exe- 
cute all the variations possible, conformed to the 
fundamental idea of a radiated structure around a 
central axis. Professor Pierce, although quite ignorant 
of natural history, at once devised the very three 
plans, discovered by Agassiz, as the only fundamental 
plans which could be framed in accordance with the 
given elements. 

How significantly do such correspondences speak 
of the working of mind in nature, moulding it in con- 
formity with ideas of reason. Thus to see the laws 
of thought exhibiting themselves as also the laws of 
being seems to me a fact sufficient of itself to prove 
the presence of an overruling mind in nature. 

Is there any way of escaping this obvious conclu- 



EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY 125 

sion ? The only method that has been suggested has 
been to refer these harmonies of nature back to the 
original regularity of the atoms. 

As the drops of frozen moisture on the window 
pane build up the symmetrical frost-forms, without 
design or reason, by virtue of the original similarity 
of the component parts, so do the similar atoms, 
without any more reason or plan, build up the har- 
monious forms of nature. 

But this answer brings us face to face with a 
third significant problem, a still greater obstacle to 
materialism. Why are the atoms of nature thus regu- 
lar — thus exactly similar, one to another ? Here are 
millions on millions of atoms of gold, each just alike. 
Millions and millions of atoms of oxygen, each with 
the same velocity of movement, the same weight, size 
and chemical properties. All the millions on millions 
of atoms on the globe are not of infinitely varied 
shape, weight, size, quality ; but there are only some 
seventy different kinds ; and all the millions of one 
kind are substantially alike, so that each new atom of 
oxygen that comes to a burning flame does the same 
work and acts in precisely the same way as its fellows. 

Did you ever think of that ? If you have ever 
realized what it means, you must recognize this uni- 
formity of the atoms, billions and billions of them as 
like one another as if run out of the same mould, as 
the most astonishing thing in nature. 

Now, among the atoms, there can have been no 
birth, no death, no struggle for existence, no natural 
selection to account for this. What other explanation, 
then, in reason is there, than to say as those great 



126 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

men of science, Sir John Herschel and Clerk Max- 
well (who have in our day, most deeply pondered this 
curious fact) have said, — that this division of all the 
infinite host of atoms in nature into a very limited 
number of groups, all the billions of numbers in each 
group precisely alike in their mechanical and chemical 
properties, gives to each of the atoms " the essential 
characters, at once of a manufactured article and a 
subordinate agent/' 

Evolution cannot then be justly charged with ma- 
terialism. On the contrary, it especially demands a 
divine creative force as the starter of its processes 
and the endower of the atoms with their peculiar 
properties. The foundation of that scientific system 
which the greatest of modern expositors of evolu- 
tion has built up about the principle of development (I 
mean, of course, Herbert Spencer's Synthetic Phi- 
losophy), is the persistence of an infinite, eternal and 
indestructible force, of which all things that we see 
are the manifestations. 

The evolution theory is indeed hostile to that phase 
of theology which conceived of God as a being out- 
side of nature. To suppose, as many of the camp- 
followers of the evolution philosophy do, that the 
processes of successive change and gradual modifica- 
tion which have been so clearly traced out in nature, 
relieve us from the need or right of asking for any 
anterior and higher cause of these processes ; or that 
because the higher and finer always unfolds from the 
lower and coarser, therefore there was really nothing 
else in existence at the beginning than these crude 
elements which alone we see at first ; and that 



EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY 127 

these gross, sensuous facts are the only source and 
explanation of all that has followed them, — this is 
a most superficial and inadequate view. For this ex- 
planation, as we have already noticed, furnishes no 
fountain head of power to maintain the constant up- 
ward-mounting of the waters in the world's conduits. 
It furnishes no intelligent directions of these streams 
into ever wise and ordered channels. To explain the 
higher life that comes out of these low beginnings, we 
must suppose the existence of spiritual powers, unseen 
at first, and disclosing themselves only in the fuller, 
later results, the moral and spiritual phenomena that 
are the crowning flower and fruit of the long process. 
When a thing has grown from a lower to a higher 
form, its real rank and nature is not shown by what it 
began in, but by what it has become. Though chem- 
istry has grown out of alchemy and astronomy out 
of astrology, this does not empty them of present 
truth or impair at all their authority and trustworthi- 
ness to-day. Though man's minds have grown out 
of the sensations of brutish ancestors, that does not 
take away the fact that he has now risen to a height 
from which he overlooks all their mists and sees the 
light which never was on sea or land. The real be- 
ginning of a statue is not in the rough outline in 
which it first appears, but in the creative idea of the 
perfect work which regulates its whole progress. 

So to discern the real character and motor power 
of the world's evolution, we must look, not to the 
beginnings, but to its end ; and see in the latest stages 
and its highest moral and spiritual forms and forces, — 
not disguises of the earlier stages, but ampler mani- 



128 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

festations of that divine power and purpose which is 
the ever-active agent, working through all the varied 
levels of creation. 

The evolution theory is, indeed, it must be acknowl- 
edged, hostile to that phase of theology which con- 
ceives of God as a being outside of nature; which 
regarded the universe as a dead lump, a mechanical 
fabric where the Creator once worked, at the im- 
mensely remote dawn of creation ; and to which again 
for a few short moments, this transcendental Power 
stooped from His celestial throne, when the successive 
species of living beings were called into being, in 
brief exertions of supernatural energy. But this 
mechanical view of God who, as Goethe said, 
" only from without should drive and twirl the uni- 
verse about," what a poor conception of God, after all, 
was that ; — not undeserving the ridicule of the great 
German. 

Certainly, the idea of God which Wordsworth has 
given us, as a power, not indefinitely remote, but ever 
present and infinitely near, — 

" A motion and a spirit which impels 
All thinking things, all objects of all thoughts 
And rolls through all things." 

is a much more inspiring and venerable thought. This 
is the conception of God that Paul has given us ; " the God 
in whom we live and move and have our being " ; this 
is the conception that the Book of Wisdom gives us, — 
" the Divine Spirit who filleth the world." And to 
this conception of God, evolution has no antagonism ; 
but on the contrary, throws its immense weight in its 
favor. 



EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY 129 

Evolution in fact, instead of removing the Deity 
from us, brings Him close about us ; sets us face to 
face with His daily activities. The universe is but the 
body of which God is the soul ; " the interior Artist," as 
Giordano Bruno used to say, who from within, moulds 
His living shapes of beauty and power. What else in 
fact is evolution but the secular name for the Divine 
Indwelling; the scientific alias for the growth and 
progressive revelation of the Holy Spirit, daily putting 
off the old and putting on the new; constantly busy 
from the beginning of time to this very day; inces- 
santly moulding and forwarding His work. 

Not long ago I came across the mental experience 
of a working geologist which well illustrates this. 
" Once in early boyhood," he says, " I left a lumber- 
man's camp at night, to go to the brook for water. It 
was a clear, cold, moonlight night, and very still, ex- 
cept the distant murmuring of the Penobscot at some 
falls. A sense of the grandeur of the forest and 
rivers ; the hills and sky and stars came over the boy 
and he stood and looked around. An owl hooted and 
the hooting was not a cheerful sound. The men were 
all asleep and the conditions were lonely enough. But 
there was no feeling of loneliness ; for with the sense 
of the grandeur of creation, came the sense very real 
and strong of the Creator's presence. In boyish 
imagination, I could see His Almighty hand, shaping 
the hills and scooping out the valleys, spreading the 
sky overhead and making trees, animals and men/' 

" Thirty years later, I camped alone in the open air 
on the bank of the Gila. It was a clear, cold, moon- 
light night. The camp-fire was low, for the Apaches 



130 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

were on the war path. An owl again hooted. But 
again all loneliness was dispelled by a sense of the 
Creator's presence, and the night of long ago by the 
Penobscot came into my mind ; and with it, came the 
question : What is the difference to my mind between 
the Creator's presence, now and then ? " 

" To the heart, it was very like ; but to the mind 
very different. Now, no great hand was shaping 
things from without. But God was everywhere 
reaching down through long lines of forces and 
shaping and sustaining things from within. I had 
been traveling all day by mountains of lava which had 
cooled long ages ago, and over grounds, which the 
sea, now far off, had left on its beaches ; and with the 
geologist's habit, recalled the lava still glowing and 
flowing, and the sea still rattling its pebbles on the 
beaches. But now, I knew it was by forces within the 
earth that the lava was poured out, and that the waves 
which rolled the pebbles were driven by the wind and 
the wind by the sun's heat. And the forces within 
the earth and the heat within the sun came from still 
further within. Inward, always inward, the search for 
the original energy and law, carried my mind ; for He, 
whose will is the source of all force, and whose thought 
is the source of all law is on the inside of the universe. 
The kingdom of God is within you " (James E. Mills). 

Now this change from the boyish idea of God 
creating things from without, to the manhood's view 
of God, creating and sustaining all things from within, 
is, indeed as this working geologist so well says, " the 
essential change which modern science has wrought 
in the habit of religious thought." 



EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY 131 

From Copernicus to Darwin, every important step 
in the development of science has cost the giving up 
of some idea of God creating things, as man shapes 
them, from without, and has illustrated the higher idea 
of a God, reaching His works from within. " Every 
step has led towards the truth that life and force come 
to the forms in which they are clothed, from God by 
the inner way ; and by the same way, their law comes 
with them ; and that the forms are the effects of the 
force and life, acting according to the law." 

Now, this is certainly a most noble, uplifting con- 
ception of the world. But how, perhaps you ask, can 
we find justification for such a view of the Divine 
Spirit as indwelling in nature ? 

Now when we consider this question, we find that 
one of the phases of the evolution philosophy that has 
been a chief source of alarm is precisely the one that 
lends signal support to this doctrine of Divine In- 
dwelling. 

Evolution especially excites aversion, because it 
connects man so closely with nature ; our souls are 
traced back to an animal origin; consciousness to 
instinct, instinct to sensibility and this to lower laws 
and properties of force. By the law of the correlation 
of forces, our mental and spiritual powers are regarded 
as but transformed phases of physical forces, con- 
ditioned as they are on our bodily states and changes ; 
and the soul, it is said, is but a child of nature, who is 
most literally its mother. 

To many minds this is appalling. But let us look 
it candidly in the face and see its full bearing. We 
will recall in the first place, the scientific law : no life 



132 THE NEW WORLD AND TEE NEW THOUGHT 

but from preceding life. Let us recollect next the 
dictum of mechanics : no fountain can rise higher than 
its source. The natural corollary and consequence of 
this is — no evolution without preceding involution. 
If mind and consciousness come out of nature, they 
must first have been enveloped in nature; resident 
within its depths. If the spirit within our hearts is 
one with the force that stirs the sense and grows in 
the plant ; then that sea of energy that envelops us is 
also spirit. 

When we come to examine the idea of force, we 
find that there is only one form in which we get any 
direct knowledge of it, only one place in which we 
come into contact with it; and that is in our own 
conscious experiences ; in the efforts of our own will. 

According to the scientific rule always " to interpret 
the unknown by the known, not the known by the 
unknown," — it is only the rational conclusion that 
force elsewhere is also will. Through this personal 
experience of energy, we get, just once, an inside 
view of the universal energy, and we find it to be 
spiritual ; the will-force of the infinite Spirit, dwelling 
in all things. That the encircling force of the uni- 
verse can best be understood through the analogy of 
our own sense of effort, and therefore is a form of will, 
of spirit, is a conclusion endorsed by the most eminent 
men of science, such as Huxley, Herschel, Carpenter 
and Le Conte. 

There is therefore no real efficient force but spirit. 
The various energies of nature are but different forms 
or special currents of this Omnipresent Divine Power. 
The laws of nature are only the wise and regular 



EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY 133 

habits of this active Divine will ; physical phenomena 
are but projections of God's thought on the screen of 
space ; and evolution is simply the slow, gradual un- 
rolling of the panorama on the great stage of time. 

In geology and paleontology, evolution is not 
directly observed, but only inferred. The process is 
too slow ; — the stage too grand for direct observation. 
There is one field and only one where it has been 
directly observed. This is in the case of domestic 
animals and plants under man's charge. Now, as 
here, where alone we see evolution going on, it is 
under the guidance of superintending mind, — it is a 
justifiable inference that in nature, also, it goes on 
under similar intelligent guidance. 

Now, it is the observation of distinguished men of 
science that we see precisely such guidance in nature. 
There is nothing in the Darwinian theory, as I said, 
that would conduct species upward rather than down- 
ward. To account for the steady upward progress we 
must resort to a higher cause. We must say with 
Asa Gray — " Variation has been led along certain 
beneficial lines, like a stream along definite and useful 
lines of irrigation. ,, We must say with Professor Owen : 
" A purposive route of development and change, of 
correlation and interdependence, manifesting intelli- 
gent will, is as determinable in the succession of races 
as in the development and organization of the individ- 
ual. Generations do not vary accidentally, in any 
and every direction ; but in preordained, definite and 
correlated courses." 

This judgment is one which Professor Carpenter has 
also substantially agreed with, declaring that the his- 



134 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

tory of evolution is that of a consistent advance along 
definite lines of progress, and can only be explained 
as the work of a mind in nature. 

The old argument from design, it has been fre- 
quently said of late, is quite overthrown by evolution. 
In one sense it is : i. e.> the old idea of a special pur- 
pose and a separate creation of each part of nature. 
But the divine agency is not dispensed with by evo- 
lution ; it is only shifted to a different point of appli- 
cation; it is transferred from the particular to the 
general, from the fact to the law. Paley compared 
the eye to a watch, and said it must have been made 
by a divine hand. The modern scientist objects that 
the eye has been found to be no hand-work. It is the 
last result of a complicated combination of forces ; the 
mighty machine of nature, which has been grinding at 
the work for thousands of years. Very well — but the 
modern watch is not made by hand, either ; but by a 
score of different machines. But does it require less, 
or more intelligence to make the watch in this way ? 
Or if some watch should be discovered that was not 
put together by a human hand, — but formed by an- 
other watch, not quite so perfect as itself, and this by 
another watch, further back, — would the wonder and 
the demand for a superior intelligence as the origin 
of the process be any the less ? Rather would it be 
greater. The further back you go and the more gen- 
eral and invariable and simple you suppose the funda- 
mental laws to have been that brought all things into 
their present form, then it seems to me, the more 
marvelous becomes the miracle of the eye, the ear, 
each bodily organ when recognized as a climax to 



EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY 135 

whose consummation each successive stage of the 
world has contributed. How much more significant 
of progressive intelligence than any special creation is 
this related whole, this host of co-ordinated molecules, 
— this complex system of countless interwoven laws 
and movements, all driven forward, straight to their 
mark, down the vistas of the ages, to the grand world 
consummation of to-day ! What else but Omniscience 
is equal to this ? 

All law, then, we should regard as a divine opera- 
tion, and all divine operation, conversely, obeys law. 
Whatever phenomena we consider as specially divine 
ought to be most orderly and true to nature. Relig- 
ion, as far as it is genuine, must therefore be natural. 
It should be no exotic, no foreign graft, as it is often 
regarded, but the normal outgrowth of our native in- 
stincts. Evolution does not banish revelation from 
our belief. Recognizing in man's spirit a spark of the 
divine energy, "individuated to the power of self- 
consciousness and recognition of God: — tracing the 
development of the spirit embryo through all geologic 
time till it came to birth and independent life in man, 
and humanity recognized itself as a child of God," the 
communion of the finite spirit with the infinite is per- 
fectly natural. This direct influence of the spirit of 
God on the spirit of man ; in conscience speaking to 
him of the moral law ; through prophet and apostle 
declaring to us the great laws of spiritual life and the 
beauty of holiness — this is what we call revelation. 
The laws which it observes are superior laws, — quite 
above the plane of material things. But the work of 
revelation is not therefore infallible or outside the 



136 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

sphere of evolution. On the contrary, one of the 
most noticeable features of revelation is its progressive 
character. In the beginning, it is imperfect, dim in 
its vision of truth, often gross in its forms of expres- 
sion. But from age to age it gains in clearness and 
elevation. In religion, as in secular matters, it is the 
lesson of the ages, that " the thoughts of men are 
widened with the process of the suns." 

How short-sighted, then, are they who seek to com- 
press the broadening vision of modern days within 
the narrow loopholes of mediaeval creeds. " There is 
still more light to break from the words of Scripture/' 
was the brave protest of Robinson to the bigots of his 
day. And as we say amen, to that, we may add — 
"yes; and more light still to come from the whole 
heavens and the whole earth." If we wish to see that 
light and receive the richest rewards of God's reveal- 
ing word, we must face the sun of truth and follow 
bravely forward. 

As we look back upon the long path of evolution 
up which God's hand has already led humanity ; as 
we see from what lowliness and imperfection, from 
what darkness and grossness God has led us to our 
present heritage of truth and spiritual life, may we 
not feel sure, that, if we go forward obediently, loyal 
to reason, we shall find a new heavens and more 
glorious, above our head ; a new earth and a nobler 
field of work beneath our feet ? 



CHAPTER VI. 

THE OLD TESTAMENT AS LITERATURE. 

In an age long past there lived a wonderful artist, 
whom men called the Divine Sculptor, so grand and 
beautiful were the productions of his chisel. 

He had carved many previous forms of beauty ; but 
one day, he found a huge tusk shed by some mam- 
moth ; and sculpturing from it a perfect foot and leg, 
he vowed that it should be the beginning of a statue, 
entirely carved in whitest ivory. 

It was only very slowly that the statue grew ; for it 
was only at long intervals that suitable pieces of ivory 
were found. But bit by bit, the legs, body, arms and 
head were built up, until at last, after many long 
years, the artist completed his cherished work. 

It was a form of rarest nobility, and instinct with 
highest aspiration, albeit full of childlike simplicity 
and ingenuousness. It represented the genius of his 
nation, robed in quaint antique garments, posed in the 
most natural of attitudes, with finger pointing upward 
to heaven and look of devout rapture. No passer-by 
could fail to be filled with admiration for this master- 
piece of art. 

But, anon, war broke out ; invaders poured into the 
land ; and the owners of the precious statue for 
safety's sake, dismembered it and hid it away in the 
ground. 

137 



138 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

Long centuries rolled by ere it was discovered again 
and disinterred. Now, it lay in fragments, soiled with 
the stains of earth and water and the ravages of time. 

Its discoverers revered it as a divine image and pro- 
ceeded to put together its separated members in such 
form as they believed a divine image should have. 
To put the various members in their natural places 
would make a mere human image of it, they thought. 
So, to avoid such dishonor and make it into as super- 
natural an image as possible, the legs were inserted in 
the armpits, the arms at the middle of the back, the 
ears were stuck in the eye-sockets, the feet where 
the ears should have been, and the head was made 
to sprout from below the breasts. And all the people 
bowed down to it ; and as they knelt about it, they 
covered up its ivory surface still deeper with paint and 
tinsel and tawdry gilding, and worshipped it as a God. 
And, indeed, it was of a certainty, like nothing ever 
seen on the earth nor in the skies above nor the waters 
beneath the earth. 

So passed many long ages, till the monstrous con- 
glomeration had become sacred with the holiness of a 
vast antiquity. 

But at length there arose a man as wise as he was 
bold, who in long and patient studies examined care- 
fully the curious image. He scraped away the dust 
and grime of time and the tawdry gilding with which 
the statue had been overlaid, and discovered the beau- 
tiful pure ivory that was hid beneath. And by com- 
paring the various parts, he learned their normal 
arrangement and the original human shape in which 
they had been moulded by their great artificer. And 



THE OLD TESTAMENT AS LITERATURE 139 

calling his fellow-citizens together, he begged them to 
cleanse the precious statue of its meretricious paint 
and excrescences and rearrange the bodily members 
and parts after a natural model so that the noble form 
under which the genius of the race had been por- 
trayed might stand once more before them. 

But alas ! he found himself at once stigmatized as 
an impious infidel and blaspheming iconoclast, who 
denied the sanctity and beauty of the Divine Being, 
whose legs grew from his shoulders, whose feet issued 
from his ears, and whose head sprouted below his 
breast. And in their rage, the multitude took up 
stones and stoned the poor man till his life-blood ran 
out on the ground before the image; and as they 
stoned him, they shouted : " Our ancient image is not 
human ; it is divine." 

And as the unlucky reformer fell beneath the mis- 
siles, he raised his voice and said : " You stone me 
to-day. But the time will surely come when your chil- 
dren shall see that it is as I say. Where I fall, an- 
other shall stand and show you more clearly that it is 
not I, but you who would degrade this beautiful 
statue. Another and yet another shall come to show 
you what a monster you have made of this master- 
piece and what a marvel of natural grandeur and grace 
you may bring out of this misshapen image if you 
will but rearrange it according to the dictates of reason 
and the type of nature. You say it is divine and 
therefore it cannot be human. But I say that it is 
precisely because it is so perfectly human that it is 
divine, — far diviner and grander than you have ever 
dreamed. And the grandchildren of you who to-day 



140 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

are pelting me to death shall then build out of these 
same death-dealing stones, a monument in my honor, 
before the restored and purified statue of the genius 
of your people." 

And all the people screamed again with rage and 
threw another volley of stones that silenced forever 
the unfortunate martyr. 

Nevertheless, in the age of their grandchildren, it 
happened even as the martyr had predicted ; and out 
of the stones was built a famous monument. And 
when the sacred image stood again before the people's 
eyes, in all its original nobility and naturalness of 
form, all the nation wondered how blind their grand- 
fathers could have been to adore the misshapen 
image. 

He that hath ears to hear, let him hear what the 
Spirit of Truth hath to say here and now to the 
Christian Church. 



The parable just related, as the reader has doubtless 
guessed, is intended to illustrate the treatment which 
the Bible has received at the hands of men. Like the 
statue of my fable, this literary embodiment of the 
genius of the Hebrew race has also been dismem- 
bered, mangled, and distorted by mistaken piety, and 
covered thick with the cheap gilding of an imaginary 
supernaturalism. Because it was believed to be the 
Word of God, credulous reverence has shut its eyes to 
all recognition of its human origin, and sought to 



THE OLD TESTAMENT AS LITERATURE 141 

eliminate from it all natural traits and elements. And 
when the higher criticism in these latter days, has 
essayed to restore to it its original symmetry and 
natural beauty, and to make manifest in its noble 
humanity its true divineness, — all the guns of ortho- 
doxy have been trained in furious cannonade upon 
these alleged profanations of the Word of God. 

In spite of this ecclesiastical fusilade, we may safely 
predict that it is only a question of time, and that, no 
distant time, when the Old Testament shall be looked 
upon as literature. Hitherto that is precisely the one 
light in which it has not been regarded. 

In the popular faith the Old Testament has been 
looked upon as everything else but literature. It has 
been regarded as a magazine of dogmas ; as a scientific 
treatise, making the investigations of geology and bi- 
ology superfluous ; as an infallible moral code, any one 
of whose precepts overruled all the instincts of mercy 
or the intuitions of conscience ; as a heavenly double 
acrostic, every word filled with threefold significance, 
natural, spiritual and celestial ; in short, as a specimen 
of supernatural penmanship, all its parts equally 
authoritative and flawless. The result has been to 
give the Bible an artificial and formal air, to separate 
it from the living world of reality, to obscure and be- 
fog its natural excellences, and to fill it with uncalled 
for difficulties. 

It is lamentable, indeed, to recall the many incon- 
sistencies and incredibilities which the traditional view 
has needlessly raised up, transmuting lyric metaphors 
into scientific marvels, traditions of later days into 
contemporaneous records, romances into autobiog- 



142 TEE NEW WORLD AND TEE NEW TEOUGET 

raphies, poetry into prose, parables into predictions, 
and love songs into mystic allegories. 

When the Pentateuch is claimed to be throughout 
written by Moses himself, all the Psalms by David, 
and the whole Old Testament to have been so divinely 
inspired as to be infallible, with what plain contra- 
dictions and insoluble entanglements are we brought 
face to face ? It is these especially that have drawn 
upon the Bible the jeers and ridicule of the unbelievers 
and the keen thrust of every skeptic. They have led 
to the " mistakes of Moses " being paraded up and 
down the land, and flouted and riddled with the most 
cutting wit and the bitterest of mockeries. And they 
have seduced the pious-minded, who were not alto- 
gether irrational, to a further wrong to the Bible ; viz., 
to the most desperate attempts to warp and twist the 
sacred texts so as, somehow, to reconcile the conflict- 
ing passages. 

But when we look upon the Old Testament as 
literature, we are no longer tempted to torture in this 
way the simple statements of these ancient writers. 
Our only ambition is to find out what they really 
meant. And we are not diverted from a consider- 
ation of their essential truth or nobleness, and put into 
an antagonistic, flaw-picking attitude by extravagant 
claims for them of a character that they themselves 
never pretended to possess. Give a young man, for 
example, the Book of Jonah to read as a part of God's 
infallible word, and how soon will his reason (naturally 
led to give a careful test to any such momentous claim) 
run against the snags of the whale and the gourd and 
the other marvels of the story, and the whole attention 



THE OLD TESTAMENT AS LITERATURE 143 

be fixed on these, either to ridicule and reject or to 
defend and explain them away ! Meanwhile the 
real lesson of the book, the broad tolerance and for- 
givingness of spirit, the omnipresence and universal 
love of God, that it aimed to inculcate, is altogether 
neglected. But present the book simply as a piece 
of ancient literature, an old legend current among the 
Hebrews, or a parable invented to enforce a lesson, and 
how easily is all the supernatural part of the story seen to 
be only the imaginative framework and embellishment 
of its noble religious lesson, no more affronting com- 
mon sense or diverting attention from the spiritual 
teaching involved than do the giants and marvels in 
" Pilgrim's Progress " prevent the reader of that from 
appropriating the similar moral lessons therein con- 
tained ! 

Again, to look upon the Old Testament as literature 
gives it a worth and an interest which it has failed to 
obtain under the traditional view. As a piece of 
divine penmanship, as a flawless fetich before which 
reason was devoutly to close its eyes, much of it was 
useless. Forbidden to criticise or discriminate, the 
only refuge was in ignoring altogether large parts of 
the Bible, and leaving their pages (after the first read- 
ing from cover to cover, which pious tradition de- 
manded) henceforth unopened. For here was passage 
after passage, which we were assured was just as 
sacred and true as anything else, from which we could 
obtain no food for either the mind or the heart. Here 
were palpable antagonisms of statement, impossible to 
harmonize ; badly joined seams where earlier docu- 
ments were patched together; coarse traditions that in 



144 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

any other book would be suppressed as indelicate; 
ritualistic details and ceremonial formalities of a 
thoroughly peurile and impractical character, at least 
for our day and generation ; barbarous revenges and 
imprecations, claiming the direct command of un- 
doubted inspiration of the divine. How many such 
blots as these burdened the sacred text ! But, when 
we recognize the Old Testament as literature, all these 
things become not only interesting, but valuable. 
These clumsy sutures of the earlier documents are 
precious as fine gold and sweeter than the honeycomb 
to the Biblical critics. These palpable discrepancies 
of the accounts and the partisan or sectional bias dis- 
closed by each are the precious seals identifying the 
different documents and authors ; and the very scien- 
tific mistakes and moral imperfections that we find, are 
the water-marks of date and country, the incontestable 
proofs of their antiquity ; and even the very crudest 
fancies and most barbarous legends, wholly inadmis- 
sible to the witness-box of history, are welcomed as 
priceless relics of that primeval mythologic age in 
which all religion and history began, and are the best 
of evidence that the Jewish religion had the same 
natural origin as all other faiths. What can the Bible 
reader who accepts it all as one infallible Word of God 
do with such passages as that where Jehovah is said to 
" walk in the garden in the cool of the evening " ; 
where the Elohim (using the polytheistic plural) say : 
" Let us make man " ; " Behold, the man is become as 
one of us " ? How is the pious believer in the in- 
fallibility of the Bible to explain the graven and 
molten images; the ephods and teraphim which as 



TEE OLD TESTAMENT AS LITERATURE 145 

late as Samuel's time were a part of the equipment of 
a priest of Jehovah ; the household idols which David 
kept in his house ; the golden bulls worshipped down 
to Jeroboam's day ; the relics of serpent-worship, in the 
brazen serpent which, as late as the reign of Hezekiah, 
was an object of veneration among the Israelites ; and 
the vestiges of devil-worship even, in the goat carried 
into the wilderness as a propitiation to the demon 
Azazel, disguised in our version under the name 
of the scapegoat, — what, I say, on the traditional 
theory of the Old Testament, can be done with these 
survivals of old nature worship and beast worship left 
in its pages, except to pass over and forget them as 
quickly as possible ? But, when the Old Testament is 
recognized as literature, they become the most sig- 
nificant footmarks of the slow upward progress of 
Hebrew faith, confirming the account, which an- 
thropology and the history of religions in general 
have given, of the successive stages of man's spiritual 
pilgrimage. 

And this leads us to notice the new vividness and 
human interest which the sacred record gains when 
its similarity of origin with other books is recognized. 

There is a somewhat familiar but instructive story 
of a boy who, on receiving a letter from a young 
companion at Malta, speaking of his visit to the place 
of St. Paul's shipwreck, exclaimed, " Why, father, did 
that happen in this world ? " 

So to many a pious reader the incidents and char- 
acters of the Old Testament are never realized as 
actual occurrences and " flesh-and-blood " persons, 
but they always stand before the imagination, as the 



146 THE NEW WOULD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

old painters distinguished their saints, with a halo of 
supernatural light about their head and the stiffness 
and unreality of so many wooden images in all their 
limbs. 

But now, when we study these records as literature, 
we soon catch sight of a host of significant little hints, 
showing that these old priests and prophets were men 
of like passions such as we are, and that the notable 
incidents in their careers had their springs in the 
social forces, political exigencies, or personal motives 
of an actual, breathing world. 

Take the figure of David, as the man after God's 
own heart, and author of all the Psalms, as church 
tradition has presented him to us. Certainly, this is a 
most inconsistent and artificial figure. But the David 
whom the new criticism shows, the chief of a band of 
outlaws who by his military exploits rises to the 
throne, brave and generous towards his friends, but 
unrelenting and vindictive towards his foes, and un- 
scrupulous in removing those who stood in his ambi- 
tious pathway, — a nature at war with itself, holding 
within him in constant struggle the typical virtues and 
vices of a society just passing over from barbarism to 
semi-civilization, — this David is an exceedingly natural 
and interesting character. 

Or take the book of Job. Looked at as an au- 
thoritative revelation in explanation of the misfortunes 
of the righteous, it is certainly very unsatisfactory. 
If we consider it as a direct revelation from God to 
explain the origin of evil and the calamities of the 
righteous, that explanation amounts substantially to 
this, — to refer them to the wiles of Satan and the 



THE OLD TESTAMENT AS LITEBATUBE 147 

capricious permission of the Almighty, before whose 
power man should be dumb ; and it omits altogether 
from the answer the Christian solution of a future 
personal life for which this life is the training. 

As the instruction of a divine revelation, this is 
terribly crude and disappointing. But, looking at Job 
as literature, we have in it the most poignant depiction 
of a soul in agony ; the most powerful presentation 
of the struggling forces of doubt, despair, indignant 
virtue, invincible faith in divine goodness, pathetic 
humility, and the self-abnegating devotedness that can 
cling to the Divine Hand even when all hope of per- 
sonal happiness has vanished, that we have in any 
book, ancient or modern, East or West. We may 
discuss to the end of time whether there ever was an 
historic Job who lived in the land of Uz, or whether 
the book is a pure fiction ; but, surely, we cannot 
doubt that this picture of Job on his ash-heap, pierced 
to the heart by the unjust suspicions of his pretended 
friends, and pouring out his heart (as the strong gusts 
of passion, at their cruel impeachment of his innocency, 
and the billows of his own unbearable agony sweep 
to and fro), in such scornful denials of personal trans- 
gression, such appeals to his divine Judge, such 
dread misgivings, now of God's justice, now of his 
own righteousness, and at last finding peace in a child- 
like resignation to the divine will, however bitter, — 
surely, we cannot doubt that this wondrous representa- 
tion of bitterest spiritual struggle came from a heart 
that had itself been in the deep waters, and had to 
tread the wine-press of grief alone. And, if we date 
its composition in the dark days of the eighth century, 



148 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

when the old faith of Israel in Jehovah's earthly re- 
wards to His faithful servants was given such a wrench, 
when the Northern kingdom had gone down in ruins, 
and the terrible invasions of the Assyrians swept over 
their land, like so many tornadoes, respecting neither 
just nor unjust, and poor King Hezekiah lived, as 
Renan vividly says, " like a bird on a twig," watching 
which way to fly the next minute, — then the social 
and political setting of the picture makes it not 
merely a personal experience, but a national experi- 
ence and a national enigma that are thus movingly 
set before us. 

Thus does the literary view of the Old Testament 
humanize it, and endow it with heightened power and 
influence over its readers. And, as it takes on a 
more graphic life, there comes with this, simultane- 
ously, a disclosure of more defined individuality and 
an affluence of national genius, not before suspected. 
When the Old Testament is regarded as a single con- 
tinuous Divine Oracle, the tendency, of course, is to 
overlook as much as possible all diversities of author- 
ship or style, because all must be equally divine, 
equally perfect. But, when it is viewed as literature, 
the varied contents of this sacred collection of the 
national remains are hailed with pleasure, and it be- 
comes quite astonishing how many-sided the Israelite 
genius was. There were not simply the recognized 
three or four kinds of books, — law, prophecy, history, 
and psalmody, — but almost every kind that any modern 
encyclopaedia of English or German literature would 
exhibit; allegory in Jotham's parable; the drama in 
Job ; satire in Ecclesiastes ; an opera or cantata in 



THE OLD TESTAMENT AS LITERATURE 149 

Canticles ; ethnographic tables of the revelations of 
nations ; didactic poems, as in Proverbs ; national lyrics, 
as in a dozen or more of the Psalms ; primitive sagas and 
war-songs, as in the patriarchal legends and in the songs 
of Moses and Deborah ; fragments of epics, as in the 
remnants of the Wars of Jehovah and the Book of 
Jashar ; snatches of popular ditties, like the Song of 
the Well and the Sword Song of Lamech ; historical 
romances, like Daniel and Esther ; novels with a pur- 
pose, like Jonah; political polemics and orations, 
such as some of the prophetical writings may quite 
properly be called. Such is the remarkable variety in 
the contents of the Old Testament that we find in it, 
when viewed as literature. 

Or look through the lens of Biblical criticism at 
writers of the same class, among whom we have here- 
tofore supposed little diversity because all were in such 
a peculiar way the mouthpieces of the divine inspira- 
tion. I mean the prophets. Notice how enigmatic 
and vaguely figurative are some of them ; how confi- 
dent and precise in their predictions, a second class ; 
and how much shrewder and more nearly accurate in 
their forecasts, a third class. And it is by no means 
those who were most bold and self-assured in their 
predictions whom history has most confirmed. 

What an interesting diversity of personal character- 
istics and literary style distinguishes them, as we fol- 
low down the stream of history ! Notice the rustic 
figures of speech and pastoral simplicity of the first 
two, — Amos and Hosea, — a style straightforward, 
sententious, and pregnant with compressed feeling. 
In Micah, also, we have another " man of the people/' 



150 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

terse and strong of utterance, denouncing in scathing 
terms the wrongs suffered by the poor of Israel at the 
hands of the rich and noble. 

In Isaiah we meet with a genius of different type, 
familiar with the best society of the times and with 
international politics, possessed of a glowing wealth 
of imagination and vividness of illustration, clothed in 
a diction of dignified splendor and energetic elegance. 

In Nahum and Habakkuk we have two more ardent 
spirits, pouring out their impassioned thoughts in the 
boldest of imagery. What dramatic power, especially, 
is there in that " Pindaric Ode " of Habakkuk's, as it has 
been called, where he looks forth from his watch- 
tower to see what the Lord will show him, and de- 
scribes with such majesty of thought and diction the 
vision of the woes drawing nigh to his people ! 

As we come down to the times of the Babylonish 
captivity, we hear the deepened tragedy of Israel's fate 
reverberating in the melancholy cadences of its great 
writers ; in the artless pathos of Jeremiah's voice so 
broken with patriotic tears ; and in the sombre im- 
agery and weird allegorical figures of Ezekiel (though 
often, it must be confessed, somewhat overloaded and 
bizarre). In the impassioned rhetoric of the second 
Isaiah in the heart-moving touches, picturesque im- 
agery, and superbly effective personifications of this 
great unknown prophet of the sixth century, the poet- 
ical genius of Israel reached its climax ; and in the 
clear, logical, and dialectic treatment of his theme in 
Malachi, — going without any flourish right at the pith 
of the matter, — we see that the roll of the prophets is 
about to be closed, and that a simpler, more concise 



THE OLD TESTAMENT AS LITERATURE 151 

and lucid school of writing is about to succeed 
them. 

And not only has the study of Biblical literature 
brought out the individualities of the different books 
of the Old Testament in instructive clearness, but 
within the envelope of what had been deemed the 
work of single authors it discovers a multiplicity of 
hands, and points out their personal characteristics in 
a most interesting manner. As the telescope and 
spectrum of the astronomer have resolved what 
seemed single stars into binary or ternary solar sys- 
tems, so has the lens of higher criticism shown us 
Isaiah and Zachariah to be each a double star, and the 
Pentateuch of Moses to be a complex system of four 
or five, or perhaps even more, noble literary suns and 
planets. This complex composition and gradual 
growth, throughout six or seven centuries, of the first 
five books, not long ago ascribed to Moses alone as 
their author, is the most notable achievement of the 
higher criticism. It has endowed this part of the 
Old Testament, to the eager student of truth and to 
all spirits ambitious of disentangling knotty problems, 
with a fascination akin to that which the authorship of 
Junius had in the last century, or the decipherment of 
the Assyrian hieroglyphics has in our day. Renan 
has well compared the task, in its delicacy and diffi- 
culty, to the decipherment of the papyri of Hercu- 
laneum, whose pages were so imbedded and stuck 
together into calcined blocks that, though the letters 
might be visible, it was impossible to say to what page 
they respectively belonged. But, as the careful un- 
rolling and patching together of these papyri by the 



152 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

classical scholars have introduced consistent order into 
these manuscripts, so have the patient comparisons 
and piecings-together of these Biblical documentary 
layers and fragments by Graf and Wellhausen, and 
especially by that prince of Biblical critics, Kuenen, 
succeeded in building up again the ancient medley of 
historical and legendary remains into an intelligible 
literary structure. 

Church history tells us that in the second century 
an early predecessor of Dr. Robinson in the work of 
gospel welding and tinkering, mortised together, out 
of the four gospels, a harmony of the life of Christ 
which he called the Diatessaron. Now, suppose this 
compilation had been so successful that Matthew, 
Mark, Luke, and John had no longer been copied in 
their original and independent form, but had been en- 
tirely swallowed up by the new compilation, and the 
very memory of their separate existence been quite 
forgotten. Suppose that the new compilation had 
been baptized with the name "the Books of Jesus," 
and that the Church should then have resisted as pious 
profanation the idea that any part of this patchwork 
calling itself the authentic history of Christ was writ- 
ten by any one except the man of Nazareth with His 
own hand ! Then we should have a pretty fair par- 
allel to the way that the students of the Pentateuch 
have been fettered, and the difficulties that they have 
had to contend with in analyzing the so-called Books 
of Moses. But, as no one to-day would think that the 
fourfold gospel narrative and its complex testimony 
would have gained either interest or historic value if 
it had been thus superseded by Tatian's single com- 



THE OLD TESTAMENT AS LITERATURE 153 

pilation, so no one ought to fail to see how much the 
Pentateuch really gains in attractiveness and power by 
this critical disinterment of the four or five separate 
writings that have been hitherto engulfed by it. It 
gives us that invaluable base line of measurement and 
parallax of position only to be had where two or more 
different points of view are found. It enables us to 
estimate better the refraction of the lines of historic 
fact produced by the sectional or political or ecclesi- 
astic bias of the various writers. And it adds to the 
illustrious group of Hebrew authors four or five no- 
table figures, who, though unnamed, possess most 
marked personal characteristics as well as local and 
partisan traits. 

In the earliest of these, the second Elohist, we dis- 
cover a writer of the ninth or tenth century, b. c, 
living in the neighborhood of Bethel or Shechem, 
who delighted in collecting the old folk-lore and pa- 
triarchial legends of his race, and who has given us a 
most charming and ingenuous picture of the primitive 
ages of humanity. Piquant and naive in style, marked 
by a certain infantile candor and rough sublimity, 
devotedly chronicling all the quaint myths and ethno- 
graphic genealogies and details that he heard of; 
with patriotic pride claiming for the ancestors of the 
Northern tribes ancient possession of all the good 
things of the country ; quite ignorant of any law lim- 
iting sacrifices or altars to Jerusalem; betraying a 
scarcely veiled polytheism on every page, — this first 
collection of the Israelite legends, which became the 
nucleus round which the rest of the Bible formed 
itself, has well been compared by Renan to Homer, so 



154 THE NEW WORLD AND TEE NEW THOUGHT 

fresh and sparkling is it with the morning dew of 
humanity's childhood. " This unknown writer," says 
Renan, with but little if any exaggeration " has 
created half the poetry of humanity. His stories 
are like a breath of the world's springtime; their 
freshness is only equaled by their crude grandeur; 
man, when these pages were written, still lived in a 
world of myths. Multitudes of Elohim filled the air, 
manifested by mysterious whispers, unknown noises 
and terrors which produced panic. Man had noc- 
turnal struggles with them, out of which he emerged 
wounded. Elohim appeared in triple form, and his 
sons take unto them wives of the daughters of men. 
Morality is scarcely born ; the mind of the Elohim is 
capricious, sometimes absurd ; the world is very small, 
heaven is reached by a ladder, or, rather, a pyramid 
with steps ; messengers constantly pass from earth to 
the empyrean. Dreams are celestial revelations, 
visions of God" (Renan, pp. 177, 178, vol. II). 

In the author of the second great stratum of the 
Pentateuch (or, perhaps more accurately, the Hexa- 
teuch ; for the Book of Joshua is an integral part and 
close continuation of the first five books) we have 
probably a man of the Southern kingdom, but of the 
eight or ninth century, b. c, and of quite a different 
type of mind. His genius is less unsophisticated and 
sunny. He is a man of a sombre and austere temper- 
ament and more philosophic cast of mind, oppressed 
with the consciousness of the sin in the world and 
full of forebodings of the wrath of Jehovah ; empha- 
sizing the jealous nature and irresistible will of the 
" I AM," greatest of all the gods ; delighting in medi- 



THE OLD TESTAMENT AS LITERATURE 155 

tations and explanations of the origin of evil and in 
chronicling the woes that descend upon sinful hu- 
manity. Civilization to him is a path of decadence 
and demoralization; the thirst for knowledge is the 
root of all evil ; social progress, a defiance of God's 
laws and loss of Paradise ; the first city originated in 
murder and transgression. As a religious creator, he 
takes the first rank. He was the original Calvinist, 
the spiritual father of Jeremiah, Paul, Augustine, Mo- 
hammed, Jonathan Edwards, and all that ilk. As 
Renan well says, " The ceiling of the San Sistine 
Chapel, with its tremendous pictures of the awful 
divine judge and the retributions of those who dis- 
obey his autocratic will, is the best illustration of this 
remarkable writer. Michael Angelo is the only artist 
who could interpret the Jahvist ; for he is truly his 
brother in genius " (Renan, p. 302, vol. II). 

In the author of the third great stratum we find a 
still different type of mind from either the preceding ; 
a man of superior culture, employing a warm and 
persuasive eloquence ; fond of stately periods ; exhib- 
iting a decidedly purer and higher tone, both ethically 
and religiously. The author of the patriarchal legends 
had, as we noticed, hardly got out of the shell of 
polytheism. The Jehovist was only in the stage of 
Monarcho-theism, revering Jehovah as the first among 
the gods. The Deuteronomist carries us on to the 
next stage, — not monotheism, but monolatry, in which, 
while the existence of other gods was still recognized, 
Jehovah was proclaimed the unique God, the sole 
object of worship, and thus did the world the inesti- 
mable service of providing the next higher step in the 



156 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

staircase of religion, from which the second Isaiah, 
Jesus, and Paul mounted to that of a true monotheism, 
in which Jehovah was not merely the only God to be 
worshipped, but the only God in existence, the One 
over all, in all, and through all. 

It was in the seventh century, shortly before or else in 
during the reign of Josiah, that the Deuteronomist wrote. 
For a long time it was thought that the next great 
contributor to this literary edifice added his notable 
fourth story, the priestly and legal part, about the 
same time. But, while there may have been many 
additions made at this time, the best critics, Graf, 
Kuenen, and Wellhausen, now put the date of this 
priestly reviser and the most of the sacerdotal legisla- 
tion, including also the noble proem, the Creation Ode 
of the first chapter, as late as the time of the Baby- 
lonish captivity, — the fifth century, b. c. This ac- 
counts for the numerous reminiscences and readapta- 
tions of Assyrian legend that he has introduced and 
the absence of allusions to this priestly code in the 
prophets of the seventh and eighth centuries. This 
priestly reviser, sometimes called the first Elohist 
(because he usually speaks of the divine only under 
the name of Elohim down to the time when the reve- 
lation of God as Jahveh is made to Moses, in Exodus 
XII), was a native of the south, — probably a resident 
in Jerusalem. He possessed scientific tastes ; had a 
fondness for genealogies, a more precise style ; aimed 
to inculcate moral lessons and preserve the memory 
of religious customs ; exhibited a mind more reflective 
and exact; sympathized with the southern tribes of 
Judah and Benjamin ; avoided as far as possible the 



THE OLD TESTAMENT AS LITERATURE 157 

anthropomorphism of the northern narrators ; and ex- 
hibits both a higher morality and a purer theism. He 
has encumbered his narrative, nevertheless, with a 
most wearisome and formal mass of ceremonial details. 
He is the ardent devotee of ecclesiastical theocracy, 
and has not hesitated, in his enthusiasm, to map out a 
whole priestly Utopia, an imposing air castle of sacer- 
dotal laws, customs, events, and institutions, con- 
structed with such precise and realistic details that for 
ages it was held to have been a veritable part of 
Hebrew history and experience. 

And this suggests a few words upon the great gain 
which our conception of Hebrew history and the 
course of its literary development has made by this 
critical reconstruction of the proper succession of its 
various books and documents. What a travesty of 
the literary and religious history of India should we 
make if we presented it in the following order : first, 
the ceremonial legislation of Manu ; next, the Vedic 
songs and myths ; third, the subtle, speculative Upani- 
shads ; and lastly, the practical moral reforms and 
spiritual teachings ! But it is just such a topsy-turvy 
picture of the course of Jewish faith and thought that 
the traditional view of the Old Testament has given 
us, putting its monotheism at the very beginning, 
supposing away back in the time of Moses a most 
minute and elaborate legislation and complicated, 
pedantic ritual system already full blown, and present- 
ing this as succeeded by such an epoch of political 
and social chaos, such a period of crude morals and 
unregulated worship, and rude, almost savage legends 
as we find in Judges and Samuel, "when" as the 



158 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

record says, " every one did what was good in his own 
eyes." 

The history of literature and the science of com- 
parative religion show us, in all the great civilizations 
of Europe and Asia, the same law of literary develop- 
ment, from the childlike to the reflective, from the 
simple to the complex ; and also the same course of 
religious evolution, first rude nature-worship and 
fetichism, then, advance through idolatry and poly- 
theism towards theism and spiritual religion. First we 
have the diviner and the soothsayer and the bard, the 
childlike chanter of primitive war-songs and myths, 
next the prophet, and after him the priest. Now, the 
traditional theory reverses this, and puts at the dawn 
of Hebrew life and literature that elaborate sacerdotal- 
ism which everywhere else comes only in the evening 
of the national life. But, when we study the Old 
Testament as literature under the microscope of the 
higher criticism, the intellectual and spiritual evolution 
of the Hebrew genius becomes again a natural one, 
exhibiting the same normal succession as the national 
consciousness of India, Egypt, Persia, and Greece. 
Thus a new orderliness is given to the Old Testament, 
and with it a greater intelligibleness. 

And in another way also does the literary view of 
the Bible give it a clearer comprehensibility ; namely 
by permitting us to use sources of illumination that on 
the traditional theory are at once ruled out. What 
new light is supplied for understanding the Genesis 
stories of the fall, the deluge, and the Tower of Babel, 
when we can illustrate them by their Assyrian ana- 
logues, if not sources ? How much more intelligible 



THE OLD TESTAMENT AS LITERATURE 159 

becomes the story of Samson, when Ave are free to 
recognize many of its distinctive features as derived 
from the primitive sun-myth, of which here we have a 
degraded survival, perhaps grafted upon some legendary 
stock ! And, especially, what an illumination is given 
to Solomon's Song of Songs, which in our King 
James' version is so darkly obscured by the interpo- 
lated headings which refer it to a mystical marriage 
of Christ and the Church, when we accept it as a 
pastoral cantata, commemorating the fidelity of true 
love, unmoved by the blandishments of rank and 
luxury ! Instead of its being a dialogue between tw 7 o, 
we must suppose, as Ewald has shown in such a 
masterly manner, a chorus and at least three principal 
characters ; namely, the Shulamite maiden, the shep- 
herd lover to whom she has pledged her affection, and 
Solomon, the king, who, captivated with her beauty, 
has taken her from her native village to his mag- 
nificent palace, and who thinks that by the glittering 
prospect he opens before her, as his favorite, he may 
induce her to abandon her rustic home and betrothed 
husband. By her steadfast resistance to the king's 
solicitations the loyal maid, however, at last convinces 
Solomon of the hopelessness of his passion, and obtains 
permission to return to the shepherd lover whom she 
cannot forget ; and at the close of the poem the faith- 
ful couple appear hand in hand, expressing in glowing 
strains the superiority of genuine affection, though in 
the humblest lot, over any union that riches or 
position may buy. This is a meaning that nobly 
vindicates the place which the Song of Songs has so 
strangely, but fortunately, retained in the sacred canon. 



160 THE NEW WOELD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

And this brings me to my final point, the increased 
value of the Old Testament, — the higher claim upon 
our admiration and our reverence that it gains when 
viewed as literature. All its natural beauties and 
excellences, of old so obscured by the artificial theories 
of its supernatural dictation, now emerge to delight 
us. What admirable character-painting is disclosed in 
the ingenious delineations of the three great patriarchs 
and their successors, — Joseph, Deborah, Samuel, Saul, 
David, and Elijah ! How sharp, forceful, naive and 
pathetic are these memorable personalities, outlined 
often with such few but graphic strokes of the pen ! 
Surely, nowhere else than in Shakspere himself can 
we find such a wonderful portrait gallery of figures, so 
diversified and full of breathing life, as we find in the 
patriarchal legends of Genesis and the historic sketches 
of Judges, Samuel and Kings. Or, if we can disabuse 
ourselves of the inclination to look upon it as either 
science or revelation, and consider it only as poetry, 
what a splendid, inspiring ode have we in that Psalm 
of Creation that makes the first chapter of the Bible 
memorable ! How superb the lyric strains of many 
of the Psalms ! What a vigorous and copious expo- 
sition of the grandeurs of nature are given by them, 
especially by that 103d Psalm, which as Humboldt 
said, is " in itself an outline of the universe." What 
persuasive springs of consolation, what powerful ethical 
instruction, do the pages of the prophets furnish ! 

I know, of course, the many dark stains that mar 
the moral tone of the Old Testament, the grave incon- 
sistencies of its spiritual teaching. When viewed as 
an infallible book, a web divinely woven, all of one 



THE OLD TESTAMENT AS LITERATURE 161 

cloth, these stains are fatal to its claims. But, when 
we look upon it as the spiritual history of a nation 
feeling its way to God, it has no superior. It possesses 
certainly that best of inspiration, the power of in- 
spiring and uplifting its readers. Take Conway's 
" Sacred Anthology" or Max Muller's fuller " Sacred 
Books of the East," and compare the other Oriental 
Scriptures with the Bible, and the more thoroughly 
you know the literature of the rest of the world, 
the more sure will you be that, on the whole, with 
all its crudities and coarseness and vengefulness on 
its head, the Bible stands far above all other 
scriptures in purity and elevation of tone. Grant 
that the vestiges of polygamy, slavery, idolatry, 
witch-burning, bloody revenges, and religious per- 
secutions may be inbedded here, like the scales of 
hideous dragons of the slime in a slab of the Saurian 
period. Yet they are but the marks of the outgrown 
shells, the off-cast skins which the spiritual genius of 
Israel successively sloughed off, and left behind it. 
They are but the lower rounds of that heavenly ladder 
which the religious consciousness of the Hebrews one 
after another trod beneath it, and rose above, as it 
struggled slowly to the recognition and proclamation 
of the purest religious truths known to antiquity. All 
these relics of a lower stage of thought and conduct 
but bear witness to the naturalness and progressive- 
ness of the religious evolution. Nowhere else in all 
literature is there a more striking and valuable pan- 
orama of the development of the spiritual conscious- 
ness of a nation. What pictures of spiritual heroism, 
standing undaunted against all odds ; what wise counsels 



162 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

to youth ; what moving and uplifting outpourings of 
devout thankfulness; what manly denunciations of 
wrong and injustice ; what appealing strains of peni- 
tence and devout trust ; what comfort to the bereaved 
and support for the tempted beam from these pages, 
as the morning stars when they sing together in their 
Maker's honor, and make the benediction of this book, 
in spite of all its flaws, unparalleled in the history of 
humanity. And this benediction shall be all the 
greater, when those who profess to reverence its lustre 
shall no more " breathe on it, as they bow," but, freed 
from artificial tinsel and glamour, it shall shine forth 
in all its natural beauty, symmetry, and matchless 
worth. 



CHAPTER VII. 

CHRISTIAN DISCIPLESHIP AND MODERN LIFE. 

Some years ago there was published in England a 
striking story which gave the imaginary history of a 
young Cornish carpenter, Joshua Davidson by name, 
who takes all that he is taught in church and Sunday- 
school with entire literalness and endeavors to act 
accordingly. 

He is assured that every word in the gospels is liter- 
ally true ; that every command and exhortation should 
be strictly obeyed ; that every promise may be confi- 
dently relied upon ; and that, as Christ is set forth as 
our pattern, He ought to be faithfully imitated. 

Poor Joshua, — learning all this every Sunday and 
from every pulpit ; and being moreover, peremptorily 
assured of it by his rector, when, in his dawning per- 
plexities, he ventures to question that august function- 
ary, resolves to shape his whole life, by the standard 
thus set up for him. Trusting in the text of Christ's 
promise to His disciples, he ate poisonous berries and 
nearly died in consequence. He handled serpents and 
was greatly astonished to find himself severely bitten 
by the vipers. And to the doctor who came to at- 
tend him, he talked so much primitive Christianity 
that the good man set him down as a lunatic. In fine, 
poor Joshua, merely by trying in all sincerity, to do 
on week days, what every Sabbath he was told our 

163 



164 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

pattern did, and he himself ought therefore to do, was 
forever getting into scrapes and being bullied by his 
teachers for really believing what they told him. 

When he gets through school, he goes to London 
and seeks to lead there, an unflinching Christian life. 
He tries to reform a regular jail-bird, nearly gets in- 
volved in his iniquities and is publicly beaten by the 
ruffian. 

He succeeds in rescuing a poor Magdalen, but he 
loses his own repute among his neighbors by taking 
her into his own house ; the only place of refuge he 
knew of to offer her. He sets up a night school for 
the scamps and villains who swarm in the court where 
he lives ; but they are so turbulent that the police ar- 
rest him as a harborer of disorderly characters. 

Poor Joshua, finding his own little strength so una- 
vailing to stem the seething tide of evil, comes to the 
conclusion that society itself must be revolutionized 
before Christianity can have any chance of being 
carried out in practice. He looks into his New Testa- 
ment and finds that the early Christians had all things 
in common; and he leaps to the conclusion that 
Christianity requires the equalization of classes. 
Capital, the aristocracy of wealth and the antagonisms 
of upper and lower classes and class distinctions, con- 
stituted, he believed, the Upas tree that poisons 
Christendom ; and he becomes an itinerant lecturer to 
rouse the masses to shake off these fetters and adopt 
socialistic principles ; and at length goes to Paris and 
joins the Communists, fancying the'ir communistic 
scheme the most hopeful attempt to work out the 
principles of Jesus. But even here, no happier lot 



CHRISTIAN DISCIPLESHIP AND MODERN LIFE 165 

awaited him. The ruffians and fanatics of that awful 
travesty nearly tore him in pieces, because of his ad- 
herence to Christ ; his faithful Magdalen was shot as 
an incendiary ; and he himself on his return to Eng- 
land, was trampled to death by an enraged mob whom 
he was addressing, on the ground that he was a Com- 
munist, a republican and an atheist. 

This tragic story puts in a striking light the opposi- 
tion which I suppose, all have sometimes remarked, 
between much of our popular preaching and the con- 
duct, actually current in society and required by it. 
It is a cutting satire upon the inconsistency, perhaps 
we might say, the cowardice or dishonesty of those 
who teach on the first day of the week that every 
word of the Bible is to be taken with a literalness with 
which we take no other book, and on the remaining 
six, act like the veriest unbeliever and heathen. Nay 
— it suggests a deeper question ; it presses upon us the 
inquiry, — is Christianity indeed applicable to modern 
society and our existing civilization ? Is it obligatory, 
or is it practicable, is it wise or right to obey and act 
out the precepts and examples of the gospel in this 
present year of our Lord ? Or on the other hand is 
Christianity to be reckoned an obsolete law, — a beau- 
tiful tradition, to be kept like a rare cup of old china, 
high up on a shelf, admiringly to be gazed upon and 
reverenced, but never used in daily life ? 

It is easy to say of such a story — " It is an extrava- 
ganza. It presents difficulties that do not occur in 
daily life." This is certainly true. But nevertheless 
would it be an extravaganza, if Christians were true 
to their professions ? Would its difficulties be inex- 



166 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

perienced if the " Imitation of Christ " showed itself in 
living men and women in our streets, instead of in 
book covers on our tables or sermons in our pulpits ? 

Where is the Church member in the strictest of 
churches, who entirely imitates the examples of the 
New Testament ? Where is he who will step on the 
sea, trusting to be sustained like Christ and Peter, by 
the power of faith ? Where is the Christian who be- 
lieves it to be his precise duty to call nothing his own, 
but to hold everything literally in common with all 
his brother Christians ? Who to-day holds it to be his 
Christian duty, in simple truth, like the lilies, to toil not, 
neither to spin ; or like the ravens, to sow not, nor reap, 
nor gather into barns ? Or if there are such Christians 
what does our modern science and political economy 
have to say to them ? What, indeed, is the tone of 
current remark in Christian circles upon such pro- 
ceedings ? Doubtless many of these inconsistencies, 
(numbers of which will occur to every one) are not so 
much inconsistencies of modern life with the gospel 
requirements as with wrong interpretations which have 
been put upon Christianity. But deducting whatever 
incompatibilities may be traced to this source, there are 
enough still left, to leave quite a formidable problem. 
While, for example, He whom we call Master, promises 
His disciples that whatsoever they ask in His name shall 
be given to them, — physical science declares that every 
law of nature is absolutely unchangeable, and moves 
not to the most fervent prayer. While the New 
Testament bids us give to him that a^keth and sell 
that which we have and give alms, our social science 
declares that alms-giving is preeminently noxious, 



CHRISTIAN DISCIPLESHIP AND MODERN LIFE 167 

encouraging idleness and profligacy, and helping to 
saddle society with a brood of permanent parasitic 
mendicants. While the gospel bids us resist not evil, 
and to him that smites thee on the one cheek, turn 
the other also, the whole of our military, police and 
legal systems is a tacit repudiation of these precepts, 
and our political experience asserts that the order of 
our great civilized communities could not be main- 
tained without repression of violence wherever it 
shows its unruly head. In short, many of the instruc- 
tions of the New Testament are (to the common sense 
of the nineteenth century) incredible and impracti- 
cable paradoxes. Let a Christian disciple, nowadays 
try to act them out literally and simply. Let him for 
example essay to cast a mountain into the sea, simply 
by faith ; let the missionary take no money in his purse 
nor shoes for his feet, when he starts on a journey, 
as the seventy were commanded by Christ to do; 
let the Christian literally pluck out the eye or cut off 
the right hand that is concerned in any sin of his ; 
let him, when a member of his family is sick unto 
death, instead of calling in the doctor call in the church 
elder to pray over him and anoint his head with oil, 
as the Apostle James commands ; and the doctors 
would be pretty likely to send him to the insane 
asylum. 

Now, here are these unavoidable antagonisms be- 
tween Christian duty, as the letter of Scripture gives 
it to us, and the usages and requirements of modern 
life. These antagonisms are becoming evident to 
great numbers, both among the strict disciples of 
Christ and among the ardent devotees of modern 



168 TEE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW TEOUGBT 

progress. On the one hand, many earnest Chris- 
tians are eager to bring the Christian world back 
to a literal acceptance and imitation of the gospel 
teachings, as the only cure for our troubles, and would 
turn their backs on modern society, as only Paganism, 
because of its variation from the pattern of ancient 
Palestinian life. A conspicuous instance of this is 
found in the recent writings of Count Tolstoi, the 
famous Russian author. Till middle life, an absolute 
skeptic and man of the world and bold assailant of 
authority, he, then, he said, made a great discovery. 
It was that the precepts of Jesus, especially such as 
" Resist not evil"; "Judge not " and " swear not at 
all" are to be taken with absolute literalness. This 
has now become " his religion " which he is enthu- 
siastic in urging upon the world. Till we give up 
courts and law proceedings, armies, police and resist- 
ance to oppression, we are not, he claims, true Chris- 
tians. On the other hand, there is the large and fast 
growing class of thoroughgoing rationalists and 
worshippers of science, to whom natural selection and 
evolution are the supreme words, and whose saints are 
Haeckel and Biichner, Comte and Bradlaugh and Inger- 
soll, who are more and more renouncing Christianity, 
because it is, they believe, irreconcilable with modern 
ideas and the laws of nature, discovered by physical 
science. Both these parties, from opposite quarters are 
pushing the mind of our generation more directly face 
to face with the question, " Which shall be given up, — 
Christian discipleship or modern thought' and life ? " 

Which, then, of these two antagonistic inmates shall 
be turned out of our heart and mind ? 



CHRISTIAN DISCIPLESHIP AND MODERN LIFE 169 

Now, those who maintain the necessity of in- 
terpreting and following the gospel literally — if at 
all, — I leave to themselves to take whichever horn 
of the dilemma they choose. I leave it to them to 
choose between the literal gospel and their daily 
practice ; between the punctilious copying of every 
act and the scrupulous observance of every word of 
Christ, on the one side and the whole network of 
modern institutions and the affirmations of modern 
thought and experience on the other. For myself, I 
would take a more excellent way. For I cannot 
spare, — modern life cannot spare either the gospel 
of Christ or the knowledge and civilization of the 
nineteenth century. 

Nor are the two when rightly interpreted, incon- 
sistent. Both should be kept ; both may be harmon- 
ized through that higher interpretation which is the 
reasonable interpretation of Christianity. 

The solution lies just here. The Christian life is 
not bound up with the letter of any book. The Chris- 
tian life is no slavish imitation of any life. To live 
the life of Christ is not to live as He did, but as He 
would live to-day. The gospel is not a code of con- 
duct out of which we are to pick out texts, here and 
there to go by ; but it is a well-spring of spiritual in- 
fluence with which we are first thoroughly to fill our- 
selves, and then, let our conduct flow freely therefrom. 

In the first place our duty as Christians is not to 
follow the letter of the gospel, but the spirit. " The 
letter killeth, the spirit giveth life/' is the profound 
admonition of Paul. He who follows the mere letter 
of the gospel may violate many of the most sacred 



170 THE NEW WOULD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

obligations of virtue. He may hold slaves and quote 
to us in justification Paul's letter to Philemon. He 
may practice polygamy and justify it by the practice 
of the patriarchs and the omission of any prohibition 
of it in the New Testament. Or he may (as a clergy- 
man in England it is said, once advised a parishioner 
who inquired of him) look on bribery as no sin be- 
cause nowhere expressly forbidden in the Bible. Of 
the letter of the New Testament we can never be as 
sure as of its spirit. We must remember that the 
gospels were not composed till forty to one hundred 
years after the events and discourses which they 
relate. We must remember that what was originally 
said has been twice translated; — first from Hebrew 
into Greek, and then from Greek into English. Espe- 
cially we must remember that Jesus was an Oriental 
and a popular teacher. There is more in these two 
facts than we are apt to allow for. The Asiatic style 
of narration is so different in its tone from the Euro- 
pean, especially so different from our prosaic Anglo- 
Saxon that we are almost sure to be misled. What 
we would express abstractly, the Oriental loves to put 
concretely. What we would say in cautious and 
measured terms, the Eastern tongue adorns with 
luxuriant garlands of imagery and hyperbole. Atha- 
nase Coquerel, the eminent French preacher, has given 
a couple of good illustrations of this. " When I was 
in the East I visited a sheik's house. He told me that 
every thing in that house, his own person and his own 
family as well as his possessions were mine ; — and he 
said this with the greatest protestations. This is ex- 
actly as if we should say to a stranger, < You are 



CHRISTIAN DISCIPLESHIP AND MODERN LIFE 171 

welcome ' — it means no more. If I had understood 
it to mean any more and on going away had taken 
anything with me, the sheik would have shot me as a 
thief." 

" I remember," also says Coquerel, " having seen 
two letters, — one written by a French General, the 
other by Abd-El-Kadir, the Arab chief who fought 
the French in Algeria. It had been decided that the 
French general and the Arab chief should say exactly 
the same thing in regard to some exchange of prison- 
ers. The French general wrote two lines ; — very 
clear, very precise, with nothing but the exact mean- 
ing he intended to convey. But Abd-El-Kadir, mean- 
ing to write the same thing, wrote a whole page about 
flowers, jewels, roses, moonshine and what not." 

Now this difference between the poetic genius of 
Oriental expression and the precision which the Euro- 
pean mind expects, must not be overlooked, and it 
necessitates a certain reduction in interpreting many 
of the strong declarations of the New Testament. 

Again, as I hinted, we must remember that Jesus 
was a speaker to the multitude. We must disabuse 
our minds of that old idea that Jesus spoke primarily 
to report from heaven to earth a body of Divinity and 
a perfect moral code, exact and exhaustive, every 
syllable weighed and measured so as to be a standard 
authority and sacred oracle for all future generations. 
We must think of him rather as aiming to fix the at- 
tention of the lounging crowd, gathered at some street 
corner or public square in Jerusalem ; or to rouse 
from their sluggishness the minds of the rustics who 
have come out on to some hilltop or by the lake-side 



172 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

to take a look at the new preacher. If he had spoken 
in the cautious, moderate and qualified style of a 
theological professor, he would never have caught 
their attention. Jesus was obliged, from the nature 
of the case, to resort to striking apothegms, — nay to 
what literally would be paradoxes, that he might lodge 
something in their minds that would quicken them 
and set them to thinking. Doubtless, too, he was 
aware of and made allowance for that curious hold- 
back in human nature, that unwillingness that the 
average man feels, to do in any matter exactly what 
another man counsels him to do. Tell a boy to do 
one particular thing and how willing you find him to 
do anything else but that ; and if at last, he yields and 
does do the thing he has been ordered to, — how apt 
he is to do it in some way just a little different from 
the way he has been commanded to do it. He seems 
to think that by so varying from the order given him, 
he in some way saves his own independence. And 
men are only boys of bigger growth and show the 
same trait by always trying to beat down their market 
man or get ten per cent, off the price of their coal or 
their potatoes. There is this eternal tendency in 
human nature to do a little less than it is wanted to, 
so that if you want to get the world a rod ahead, you 
must command it to go a furlong. John Stuart Mill 
in his autobiography, speaking of one of his pamph- 
lets, " England and Ireland," says, — " It is the char- 
acter of the British people, or at least of the higher 
and middle classes who pass muster for the British 
people, that to induce them to approve of any change, 
it is necessary that they should look upon it as a 



CHRISTIAN DISCIPLESHIP AND MODERN LIFE 173 

middle course. They think any proposal extreme 
and violent, unless they hear of some other proposal 
going still further, upon which their antipathy to ex- 
treme views may discharge itself. So it proved in the 
present instance. My proposal was condemned. But 
any scheme for Irish land reform, short of mine, came 
to be thought moderate by comparison/ It was on 
this principle, also, so I have heard Wendell Phillips 
say, that he and the early Abolitionists urged the 
people of the North to dissolve the Union so as to get 
rid of the responsibility for slavery. They persuaded 
hardly any one to go that length with them. They 
did not expect to. But by urging that extreme, they 
brought people up to saying, " We cannot consent to 
give up the constitution and the Union ; but anything 
short of that : — free territories, personal liberty bills ; 
colored schools, — in anything of this sort we will 
support you. And the very people gladly promised 
this, who, if we had asked only for these lesser things 
would have been just as unwilling to yield them." 

Now Jesus, I believe, understood this trait of human 
nature, and made it serve him ; and it is the explana- 
tion of many of the apparent paradoxes of the gospel. 
If he had simply bidden men, when struck on the 
cheek, bear it with patience, he would have made 
very slight impression on their minds and his admoni- 
tion would have accomplished little or nothing. But by 
bidding them " turn the other cheek, also," — he arrests 
men's thoughts and gets them half-way to the goal he 
has bidden them to go ; to the point, that is, of recog- 
nizing it as a duty to bear injuries patiently, which 
was probably in fact all that Jesus desired. So with 



174 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

the precept enjoining the disciple to go " two miles with 
him that ask thee to go one ; " to " give up thy coat, also, 
to him that takes thy cloak; " — if we follow these pre- 
cepts to the extent that common sense and a just regard 
for our other duties limits them, we may feel that we are 
following them as far as Jesus expected us to. Every 
other excellence seems to be ascribed to Jesus except 
this attribute of common sense. But he who was the 
perfection of manhood, surely was not lacking in the 
one thing most essential to wisdom and balance of 
character. And as he had common sense himself, 
he expected to find it in those to whom he spoke. 

Again, we must distinguish between the circum- 
stances of the age and country in which Christ lived 
and our own. He spoke, — in the form of his instruc- 
tion, — for his own time. Were he teaching now 
among us, the form, the details of his instruction 
would doubtless be different. For example, among a 
simple rustic community, like that of Palestine, there 
was not the same danger of breeding a pauper class 
by the custom of alms-giving, as with us. It was the 
natural way of relieving honest distress. So wealth 
was less often won without fraud or extortion, in 
those days. It spoke generally of injustice and op- 
pression. It did not play, in the economy of Christ's 
people, that useful place in the development and im- 
provement of society that it does in modern life. 
The social science of Palestine would hardly be the 
same as that which England and America call for, to- 
day. The practical methods that may have been wise 
in Galilee, 1, 800 years ago, may not be so at all in 
modern Christendom. We must not confound the 



CHRISTIAN D1SCIPLESRIP AND MODERN LIFE 175 

realm of the spiritual with the realm of the material. 
Christianity has no particular system of political 
economy. Christianity has no special system of 
transacting business. Christianity has no unchange- 
able specifications of dogma or conduct, the line of 
which it always requires its disciples to toe. It is not 
a set of rules and precepts, but of principles. It is a 
grand stream of vital spirit, flowing from the heart of 
Christ, down through the centuries, infusing all insti- 
tutions and customs, while it expands itself to the 
breadth of the advancing age. Christianity is, indeed, 
a religion of every-day life ; a religion of business ; a 
religion that embodies itself in social activities. But 
it has nowhere any special institutions, any special 
forms ; any special acts or instrumentalities that it in- 
sists upon. What it insists on is the feeling, the mo- 
tive that is carried into all. That must always be 
high and pure. Every sentiment of the Christian 
must be noble. Every purpose must be unselfish. 
Every beat of his heart must remember his neighbor's 
good. Every thought must be touched with a rever- 
ence for the Divine. Let the intellect seek what path 
it thinks best. Only let the generous heart be the 
driver. Let common sense conduct the affairs of so- 
ciety and the state as she deems wisest. Only let love 
to God and man be the end. Of every special deed, 
true Christianity says, as Paul said of the eating of 
meat, — " Let him that eateth, eat unto the Lord, and 
him that eateth not, likewise unto the Lord. To his 
own Master, he standeth or falleth." Christ is indeed, 
the pattern which our religious aspirations should set 
before them, But we cannot repeat all the actual 



176 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

deeds or ideas of Christ to advantage in this nineteenth 
century, any more than we can wisely wear in our north- 
ern climes, the loose, thin robes that Jesus wore; or use 
sandals on our feet, instead of shoes ; or talk Aramaic, 
as Christ did ; or image in our own faces, the personal 
likeness that belonged to him. What we are to seek is 
that which Paul exhorted the Philippians to attain to ; 
" the mind which was in Christ Jesus " ; that spirit, 
temper, enduring and inspiring character — that life, in 
fine, " which shone " as Mr. W. R. Greg has well said, 
" through all his actions and permeated all his sayings, 
and which was so vital, so essential, so omnipresent and 
so unmistakable, as to have survived through all the 
channels and processes of transmission, — this mind of 
Christ can alone be safely followed as his real teach- 
ing. Doubts and disputes among Christians have 
been endless as to the doctrine of Christ ; as to the par- 
ticulars of what he said and did. None, we believe, 
ever truly differed as to the tone and temper of his 
mind or of his teaching." We may doubt the 
wisdom and the obligation still to obey some of 
Christ's verbal commands. We may declare that 
he who gives to every one that asks of him, will 
be likely only to minister to sloth and sensuality ; 
that he who turns the other cheek, also, to the fist 
that has already smitten him on one cheek, only en- 
courages the riot of violence and force. But we can- 
not dispute that the spirit that these precepts incul- 
cate is the right spirit ; that this mood of universal, 
all-forbearing love is the only mood that can bring 
the fallen soul to its better self ; is the only mood in 
.Which even stern correction should be inflicted. 



CHRISTIAN DISCIPLESHIP AND MODERN LIFE 177 

To have " the mind that was in Christ Jesus " is the 
true Christian life. And that life is always feasible. 
We cannot conceive any single form or manifestation 
of it that may not thrive in fullest vitality in society 
as now constituted, and find ample work in purging it 
of its evils and developing its capabilities, without 
seeking to overturn its foundations. " The shell of 
verbal form," Mr. Greg has truly said, " in which 
Christ's thoughts have come down to us, may pass 
from the belief of man and from harmony with so- 
ciety. The world has outgrown some ; it will, doubt- 
less, outgrow more. But the kernel, — the spirit, — 
belongs to all time." To follow this spirit is, of course, 
a work beset with difficulties, — as all things worth 
getting are. And some of these difficulties, come, it 
is true, from the very spirit of our age. To lead a 
life that shall make our fellow-men better is not the 
simple thing it was of old. It is beset with many 
perplexities. Our civilization is so complex that it is 
a difficult thing to follow out the windings of an act 
to its real consequences in society. It is a difficult 
thing to balance the two sides that we have learned to 
see that there are to almost every question. The 
Christian disciple nowadays needs the wisdom of the 
serpent, or in spite of himself, he will fail to be 
" harmless as the dove." But if there are these hin- 
drances to Christian living, in modern society, — on 
the other hand what great helps are there ! There 
has never been a time, I believe, more full of the 
Christian spirit. Never a time when men sought 
more generally and more patiently how they might 
improve the condition of society. Never a time when, 



178 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

there was a more earnest desire to get at the real, at 
the substantial, the actually helpful, — pushing one side 
old worn out forms, perhaps with a little rudeness, but 
with diligence and intelligence advancing towards that 
which is truly useful to the race. Look around at our 
public institutions, our hospitals, asylums, Social 
Science Associations, Reform Schools, Fresh Air 
Funds and Outings, Free Kindergartens, Lend-a-Hand 
Societies, People's Palaces, College Settlements, Peace 
Conferences, Working People's Clubs, and what grand 
strides have been made within the last century towards 
the better realization of the coming of Christ's king- 
dom of love and peace on earth. But still — how far, 
alas ! are we yet, from the glorious consummation. 
God knows how much we fall short of it. But the 
fault, I believe, lies not in the age ; nor in our institu- 
tions, nor yet in the gospel itself. It lies in ourselves ; 
in the pressure of the senses upon the spirit; the 
rivalry of the flesh with the soul ; the weariness of 
the body and the weakness of the will. Let us seek 
to get more of the mind which was in Christ ; that 
absolute devotion to our fellow-men and to God. Let 
us not squander our forces, endeavoring to overturn 
society. Let us trust that the experience and struggle 
for existence of humanity in these many thousand 
years that we have been on the earth, have settled 
some of the simpler conditions of social life. Let the 
sword go unmelted ; but let it strike only for right 
and justice. Despise not the power of riches ; but let 
them be used for the blessing of soci'ety. Let the 
distinctions of property and class remain. But let 
them be consecrated to the discharge of their respect- 



CHRISTIAN DISCIPLESEIP AND MODERN LIFE 179 

ive duties, and to the better fulfilment of what mutual 
love and helpfulness demands. It is a fascinating 
vision, — the vision of the days of primitive Christian- 
ity renewed amongst us ; the very life of Jesus in 
Nazareth and Jerusalem, led again here, just as he 
passed it there. But that time is gone by forever. 
Yet that which is left to us ; the realizing of his mind 
in every one of our lives, — taking on the new forms 
which our larger opportunities and larger experience 
justify, how much nobler a picture would that make ! 
Would it not, indeed, be the realization of those 
greater miracles which Christ himself foretold that 
his disciples should work when his own task on earth 
was ended? 



CHAPTER VIII. 

MODERN DOGMATISM AND THE UNBELIEF OF THE AGE. 

An eminent ecclesiastic of the Church of England 
once characterized the present age as preeminently 
the age of doubt, and lamented that whether he took 
up book or magazine or sermon, he was confronted by 
some form of it. 

This picture of our age is not an unjust one. The 
modern mind is thoroughly wide-awake and has quite 
thrown off the leading strings of ancient timidity. All 
the traditions of history, the laws of science, the 
principles of morals are overhauled and the founda- 
tions on which they rest relentlessly probed. And 
our modern curiosity can see no reason why it should 
cease its investigations when it comes to the frontiers 
of religion. It deems no dogma too old to be sum- 
moned before its bar; no council nor conclave too 
sacred to be asked for its credentials ; no pope or 
scripture too venerable to be put in the witness-box 
and cross-examined as to its accuracy or authority. 
In all the churches there is a spirit of inquiry abroad, 
— nay, almost every morning breeze brings us some 
new report of heresy, or the baying of the sleuth- 
hounds, as they scent some new trail of heterodoxy ; 
and the slogan of dogmatic controversy echoes from 
shore to shore. 

To the greater part of the church this epidemic of 
180 



MODERN DOGMATISM 181 

scepticism is a subject of grave alarm. Unbelief 
seems to them, as to Mr. Moody, the worst of sins ; 
and they consider the only proper thing to do with it, 
is to follow the advice which the Bishop of London 
gave some years ago, — and fling doubt away as you 
would a loaded shell. They apparently look upon 
Christianity as a huge powder magazine, which is 
likely to explode if a spark of candid inquiry comes 
near it. 

Others on the contrary, fold their arms indifferently 
and regard this new spirit of investigation as only an 
evanescent breeze, which can produce no serious 
result upon the citadel of faith. A third party hails it 
with exultation as the first trumpet blast of the theo- 
logical Gotterdamerung, — the downfall of all divine 
powers and the destruction of the Christian superstition 
to give place to the naked facts of scientific material- 
ism. 

What estimate then, shall we put on this tendency ? 

In the first place we must recognize that it is a 
serious condition ; that it is no momentary eddy, but 
a permanent turn in the current of the human mind. 
Humanity is looking religion square in the face, 
without any bandage over the eyes, in a way it never 
has confronted it before; and when humanity once 
gets its eyes open to such questions, — it is in vain to 
try and close them, before it has thoroughly examined 
the subjects at issue. Certainly, Protestantism cannot 
call a halt upon this march. For it was Protestantism 
itself, proclaiming at the beginning of her struggle 
with Rome, the right of private judgment, which 
started the modern mind upon this high quest ; and 



182 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

Protestantism is therefore bound, in logic and honor, 
to see it through to the end, whatever that end may- 
be. 

And in the next place I believe that quest will end 
in good. Why the champions of faith should regard 
doubt as devil-born, rather than a providential instru- 
ment in God's hand, is something I do not understand. 
If doubt humbles the church and acts as a thorn in 
its flesh, may not such chastening be providential, 
quite as much as the things which puff it up. As 
Luther well expressed it : — " We say to our Lord — 
that if He will have His church, He must keep it. For 
we cannot. And if we could, we should be the 
proudest asses under heaven/' As Attila was the 
scourge of God to the Roman world, when God 
needed to clear that empire out of the way, as He 
built His new Christendom, — so may not doubt be the 
scourge of God to this easy-going, sleepy, too credu- 
lous piety of to-day which swallows all the husks of 
faith so fast that it never gets a taste of the kernel ? 

Yes, doubt is often the needed preparation for 
obtaining truth. We must clear out the thorny 
thicket of superstition before we can begin to raise 
the sweet fruit of true religion. There are times when 
careful investigation is rightly called for. When 
doubting Thomas demanded to see the point of the 
nails and to touch and handle the flesh of the risen 
Christ, before he would believe in the resurrection of 
his Lord, his demand for the most solid proof of the 
great marvel was a wise and commendable one, — one 
for which all subsequent generations of Christians are 
deeply indebted to him. To believe without evidence, 



MODERN DOGMA TISM 183 

or to suppress doubt where it legitimately arises, is 
both fostering superstition and exposing ourselves to 
error and danger. What shall we say of the merchant 
who refuses to entertain any question about the sea- 
worthiness of his vessel, but sends her off across the 
Atlantic, undocked and unexamined, piously trusting 
her to the Lord ? Shall we commend him ? or not 
rather charge him with culpable negligence ? And 
what we say of such a merchant, seems to me just 
what we should say of the Christian who refuses to 
investigate the seaworthiness of that ship of faith 
which his ancestors have left him. In astronomy, in 
politics, in law, we demand what business the dead 
hand of the past has on our lip, our brain, our purse ? 
Why should the dead hand of Anselm, Augustine or 
Calvin be exempt from giving its authority? Why 
should their mediaeval glimpses of truth be given the 
right to close our eyes to-day from seeing what we 
ourselves can see and seal our lips from speaking forth 
what we can hear of heavenly truth ? 

In all other departments of knowledge, investigation 
has brought us to a higher outlook, where we see 
the true relations of things better than before. In all 
other branches, God has given us new light, so that 
we discern things more as they really are. Science 
has risen, by making a ladder of its earlier errors and 
by treading them under foot, has reached to higher 
truths. The Bible itself is the growth of ages ; and 
Christian doctrine and Christian creeds have been the 
evolution of a still longer period. The dogmas of the 
churches are most manifold and conflicting. Is it not 
rather immodest and absurd for each church to claim 



184 TEE NEW WORLD AND TEE NEW TEOTJGET 

infallibility for its present creed and that wisdom died 
when the book of Revelation closed the Bible, or the 
Council of Trent or the Westminster Assembly 
adjourned its sitting ? It seems to me that the 
churches ought, instead, to be willing and anxious to 
receive whatever new light God may grant them to- 
day, and with the potent clarifying processes of 
reason, separate the pure gold of religion from the 
dross and alloys of olden superstition and misguided 
judgment. 

But to the modern devotees of dogma any sub- 
jection of it to the cleansing of the reason seems 
shocking. What, e. g.> was the forefront of the offend- 
ing of Robert Ingersoll, on account of which so large 
a part of the religious world considered him an infidel, 
sure to be eternally lost, than that he dared to test the 
Bible and popular creeds by reason and freely vent 
his matchless wit, irony and indignant eloquence on 
those parts and interpretations that would not meet 
the test. Or in the case of another heretic of our day 
— a man of most reverent spirit and thorough scholar- 
ship — never scoffing at sacred things as Colonel 
Ingersoll did — yet on whose trail the heresy-hunters long 
fiercely followed — for what was Dr. Charles A. Briggs 
tried and suspended from the ministry of the Presby- 
terian Church. And when for the sake of peace, he left 
that denomination and sought in its stead the fold of 
Episcopacy, for what was he still pursued with much 
loud sacerdotal baying and barking? Why else than 
that he frankly admitted errors in the Bible and gave 
to reason (by which he meant, as he explained, not 
merely the understanding but also the conscience and 



MODERN DOGMATISM 185 

religious instinct in man) a conjoint place with the 
Bible and the Church in the work of salvation and the 
attainment of divine truth ? 

To the modern dogmatist, these positions seem 
sceptical and pernicious. But to the philosopher, who 
knows the laws of human nature and to every scholar 
who knows the actual history of the Bible, these posi- 
tions seem only self-evident. That in the scriptures 
there are innumerable errors in science, mistakes in 
history, prophecies that were never fulfilled, contradic- 
tions and inconsistencies between different books and 
chapters — these are facts of observation, which every 
Biblical student knows full well. And another thing 
every scholar knows equally well — that these original 
autographs of the sacred writers, — for whose infalli- 
bility the conservatives contend, — are things that no 
one in these modern days has ever seen or can ever 
know what they are. For the oldest of the New 
Testament Greek manuscripts is 200 years later than 
the age of the evangelists and the oldest Hebrew 
manuscript of the Old Testament is 700 or 800 years 
older than the date of composition of their latest part. 
Granting, then, for the sake of argument, that the 
Bible was given originally by infallible divine dicta- 
tion, yet the men who wrote down the message were 
fallible ; the men who copied it were fallible ; the men 
who translated it (some of it being twice translated, — 
first from Hebrew to Greek and then from Greek to 
English) were fallible ; and the editors who from the 
scores of manuscripts, by their personal comparison 
and decisions between the conflicting readings, patched 
together our present text, were most fallible. And 



186 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

when thus a Bible reader has got his text before him, 
how can he understand it except by using his own 
reason and judgment, — instruments again, most fallible. 

How is it possible then, to get Bible-truth in- 
dependently of the reason or in entire exemption 
from error ? The only way would be to say that not 
only was the original manuscript of the Bible verbally 
inspired; but all its authors, copyists, editors and pious 
readers were also infallibly inspired. As, in the old 
Hindu account of how the world was supported, the 
earth was said to be held up on pillars, and the pillars on 
an elephant, and the elephant on a tortoise, and when the 
defender of the faith was asked — " what then did the tor- 
toise rest on?" he sought to save himself in his quandary 
by roundly asserting that it was " tortoise all the way 
down"; so the defender of the infallibility of the 
scripture has to take refuge in " inspiration all the 
way down." But if this be so, — ought not the mod- 
ern Biblical editors and revisers, translators and pro- 
fessors of to-day also to be inspired, as much as those 
of King James' day or the printers at the Bible House ? 
and thus we reach, as the reductio ad absurdum of this 
argument, the result that Tischendorf and Kuenen, 
Gregory and Dr. Briggs, Dr. Preserved Smith and Dr. 
McGiffert, the very Hebrew professors and higher critics 
who are accused of heresy, are really themselves the 
channels of infallible inspiration. For unless these 
Biblical scholars of the present day are inspired and 
providentially guided, a most essential link in the 
chain of inspiration is missing. 

The sincere investigators into the character of the 
Bible and the nature of Christ are charged with ex- 



MODERN DOGMATISM 187 

alting human reason above the word of God. But as 
soon as the subject is investigated and a Professor 
Swing or a Dr. McGiffert corroborates his interpreta- 
tion by the scripture itself, or Dr. Briggs and Pro- 
fessor Smith show their views to be sustained by 
history, by philosophy, by a profounder study of 
both nature and the Bible, — then, the ground is 
shifted and it is maintained that it is not a question 
whether the views are true; but whether they con- 
form to the creed; that the catechism is not to be 
judged by the Bible or the facts in the case ; but Bible 
and facts are to be interpreted by the words of the 
confession ; and if they do not agree with this, — then, 
heresy and infidelity are made manifest. The ques- 
tion is not whether the water of truth be found ; but 
whether it is drunk out of an orthodox bottle, with the 
Church's label glued firmly upon it. 

But let us stop for a moment and ask whence came 
these creeds and catechisms themselves ? What else 
was their origin than out of the reason of man, out of 
the brains of scholars, (quite as fallible, quite as par- 
tisan and far less well-informed than our scholars to- 
day) as these older scholars in former years, criticized 
and interpreted the same scripture and nature and laws 
of God. 

Thus it is the dogmatists themselves who, in point 
of fact, exalt the reason of man above the word of God, 
forbidding us, as they do, to listen to the voice of God 
in our own soul ; forbidding us to decipher the revela- 
tions which the Divine Hand has written on the rocks 
and trees and animal structures of his own Creation, 
and even frowning upon that profounder study of the 



188 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

scripture called the higher criticism ; and bid us accept, 
in its stead, the man-made substitute of some council 
or assembly of former generations, less well-informed 
than ourselves. 

There have undoubtedly been periods when the 
doubt with which the church had to deal was mainly 
frivolous or sensual; a passionate rebellion of the 
carnal nature, attacking the essential truths of religion. 
But such is not the nature of the doubt that is at 
present occupying the public eye; such is not the 
doubt most characteristic of our generation. It pro- 
ceeds from serious motives. It is a doubt marked by 
essential reverence and loyalty to truth. It is a desire 
for more solid foundations ; for the attainment of the 
naked realities of existence. It is a necessary incident 
of the great intellectual awakening of our century. A s 
the modern intellect comes back on Sunday from its 
week-day explorations of the history of Rome or the 
myths of Greece or the religious ideas of Buddha or 
Zoroaster, it must return to the contemplation of the 
Christian dogmas under the influence of new ideas. 
It will necessarily demand what better evidence the 
law of Moses or the creed of Athanasius has than the law 
of Manu or the text of the Zendavesta. The scepti- 
cism of our age is not so much directed against the 
great truths of religion as against the man-made 
dogmas that have usurped the sacred seat. 

If irreverent, scoffing scepticism were to be found 
anywhere to-day, it would most likely be found mani- 
fested among the throng of young men 'gathered at 
our most progressive universities. But eminent men 
connected with orthodox denominations have testified 



MODERN DOGMATISM 189 

that if these students are sceptical, it is because they 
are too serious-minded and too true, to accept con- 
victions ready-made ; to take traditional creeds instead 
of personal beliefs ; or church formularies in place of 
a life of devotion. 

Now, to call such a state of mind irreligious or 
infidel is most unjust. The irreligion lies rather with 
those who make a fetish of the Bible and substitute a 
few pet texts from it, that sustain their own private 
opinions, in place of that divine light that lighteth 
every man that cometh into the world. The real 
infidels are they who reject the revelation which God 
is making us continually in the widening light of 
modern knowledge, and by a species of ecclesiastical 
lynching, condemn before trial the sincere, painstaking 
and careful scholars and reverent disciples of Christ, 
who are so earnestly seeking after truth, — because the 
results of their learned researches do not agree with 
the prejudices of their anathematizers. It is with no 
less cogency of argument than nobility of feeling that 
Dr. Briggs replied to his assailants : " If it be heresy 
to say that rationalists like Martineau have found God 
in the reason, and Roman Catholics like Newman, 
have found God in the church, — I rejoice in such 
heresy and I do not hesitate to say that I have less 
doubt of the salvation of Martineau and Newman than 
I have of the modern Pharisees who would exclude 
such noble men, — so pure, so grand, the ornaments 
of Great Britain and the prophets of the age, — from 
the kingdom of God." 

Scepticism and religious questioning are, then, no 
sins. They are not irreligious. But surely they do 



190 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

vex the church. What shall the church do about 
them. 

In the first place we should not try to suppress 
them. Nor should we tell religious inquirers to shut 
their eyes and put the poppy pillow of faith beneath 
their heads and go to sleep again and dream. They 
have got their eyes wide open and they are determined 
to know whether those sweet visions which they had 
on faith's pillow are any more than illusions. Nor 
will they be satisfied and cease to think, by having a 
creed of 300 or 1,500 years antiquity recited to them. 
The modern intellects that have taken Homer to 
pieces, disinterred Agamemnon's tomb, unwound the 
mummy wrappings of the Pharaohs, weighed the stars 
and chained the lightnings are not to be awed by any 
old-time sheepskin or any council of bishops. They 
demand the facts in the case ; they desire fresh manna 
to satisfy their heart hunger; they crave the solid 
realities of personal experience. It is too late to-day 
to say to the great tide of modern thought — " Thus 
far shalt thou go and no further." The old ramparts 
are broken through and we must give the flood its 
course. The only spirit to meet it in, is that of frank- 
ness and friendliness. Let us not foster in these 
questioning minds the suspicion that there is any part 
of religion that we are afraid to have examined. We 
smile at the bigoted Buddhist who, when the European 
attempted to prove by the microscope that the monk's 
scruples against eating animal food were futile (inas- 
much as, as in every glass of water which 'he drank, he 
swallowed millions of little living creatures) smashed 
the microscope for answer — just as if that altered at 



MODERN DOGMA TISM 191 

all the facts. But are not many of the heresy-hunters 
in Christendom quite as foolish, in their efforts to sup- 
press the testimony which nature and reason and 
scholarship every day present afresh ? 

Let us therefore give liberty, — yes — even sympathy 
to these perplexed souls who are struggling with the 
great problems of religion. 

And secondly, let us be honest with them and not 
claim more certainty for religious doctrines or more 
precise and absolute knowledge about divine and 
heavenly things than we have. One of the great 
causes of modern doubt is unquestionably the excessive 
claims that theology has made. It has not been con- 
tent with preaching the simple truths necessary to a 
good life ; that we have a Maker to whom we are re- 
sponsible, a Divine Friend to help us, a Divine voice 
within to teach us right and wrong ; that in the life 
that is to follow this, each shall be judged according 
to his deeds, and that in the examples of the Apostles 
and prophets, especially in the spotless life of Jesus, 
we have the noble patterns of the holy life set up 
before us for our imitation ; a revelation of moral and 
religious truth all sufficient for salvation. The church 
has not been content with these, almost self-evident 
truths ; but it must go on, to make most absolute 
assertions about God's foreknowledge and foreordina- 
tion and Triune personality ; and the eternal punish- 
ment of the wicked, and the double nature and pre- 
existence of Christ, things not only vague and incon- 
sistent, but contradictory to our sense of justice and 
right. It must go on to make manifold assertions 
about the inerrancy and verbal inspiration of the 



192 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

Bible and the details of the future life and the fall of 
human nature, which are utterly incredible to rational 
minds. And the worst of it is, that all these things 
are bound up in one great theological system, and 
poor, anxious inquirers are told that they must either 
take all, or none ; and so (soon coming face to face 
with some palpable inconsistency or incredibility) they 
not unnaturally give up the whole. Trace out the 
religious history of the great sceptics, the Voltaires, 
the Bradlaughs, the Ingersolls, the Tom Paines, and 
you will see that the origin of their scepticism has 
almost always been in a reaction from the excessive 
assumptions of the ecclesiastics themselves. It is too 
fine-spun and arrogant orthodoxy that is itself respon- 
sible for half of the heterodoxy of which it complains. 
Let the church, then, be candid and claim no more 
than it ought to. Let it respect and encourage 
honesty in every man in these sacred matters. The 
church itself should say to the inquirer : you are un- 
faithful to your God, if you go not where He, by the 
candle of the Lord, — i. e. y (the reason and conscience 
He has placed within you) leads you. And when a 
man in this reverent and sincere spirit, pursues the 
path of doubt, how often does he find it circling 
around again towards faith and conducting him to the 
Mount of Zion. The true remedy for scepticism is 
deeper investigation. As all sincere doubt is at bot- 
tom a cry of the deeper faith, that only that which is 
true and righteous is Divine, so all earnest doubt, 
thought through to the end, pierces the dark cloud 
and comes out in the light and joy of higher con- 
victions. It lays in the dust our philosophic and 



MODERN DOGMATISM 193 

materialistic idols and brings us to the one eternal 
Power, the everlasting Spirit, manifested in all ; that 
Spirit " whose name is truth, whose word is love." 

The reader may perhaps remember the story of the 
climber among the Alps, who having slipped off a 
precipice, as he thought, frantically grasped, as he 
fell, a projecting root and held on in an agony of an- 
ticipated death, for hours, until, utterly exhausted, he 
at last resigned himself to destruction, and let go of 
his support, to fall gently on the grassy ledge beneath, 
only a few inches below his feet. So, when we resign 
ourselves to God's hand, our fall, be it little or be it 
great, lands us gently in the Everlasting Arms that 
are ever underneath. 

Do not fear, then, to wrestle with doubt; or to 
follow its leadings. Out of every sincere soul struggle, 
your faith shall come forth, stronger and calmer. 
And do not hesitate to proclaim your new convic- 
tions, when they have become convictions. Such is 
the encouragement and sympathy that the church 
should give the candid questioner. 

On the other hand, it may wisely caution him, not to 
be precipitate, in publishing his doubt. Let him wait 
until it has become more than a doubt; till it has become 
a settled and well-considered conclusion, before he in- 
flicts it upon his neighbor. The very justification for 
doubting the accepted opinion, the sacredness of truth, 
— commands caution and firm conviction that our new 
view is something more than a passing caprice of the 
mind, before we publish it. But when the doubter is 
sure of this, — then, let him no longer silence his 
highest thoughts. 



194 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

Again, the church is justified in cautioning the 
doubter not to be proud of his doubt as a doubt. 
There is no more merit, it is well to remember, in dis- 
believing than in believing; and if your opinions 
have, as yet, only got to the negative state and you 
have no new positive faith or philosophy to substitute 
for the old, — you are doing your neighbor a poor 
service in taking away from him any superstition, 
however illogical, that sustains his heart and strength- 
ens his virtue. 

And further, let me say, — I should dislike very 
much to have any sceptic contented with doubt. 
Doubt makes a very good spade to turn up the 
ground ; but a very poor kind of spiritual food for a 
daily diet. It is a useful, often an indispensable 
half-way house in the journey of life ; but a very cold 
home in which to settle down in, as the end of that 
journey. 

In all our deepest hours, when our heart is truly 
touched or our mind satisfied, — we believe. It is 
each soul's positive faith, however unconventional or 
perhaps unconscious that faith may be, that sustains 
its hope, that incites its effort and that supports it 
through the trials of life. Any doubt, even, that is 
earnest and to be respected, is really an act of faith, — 
faith in a higher law than that of human creeds, faith 
in a more direct revelation, within ourselves, in our 
own sense of justice and consistency, than is to be 
found in any manuscript or print. 

The very Atheist who in the name of truth, repu- 
diates the word of God, is really manifesting (in his own 
different way) the belief which he cannot escape, in 



MODERN DOGMATISM 195 

the Divine Righteousness and its lawful claim on every 
human soul. She was right who wrote : 

" There is no unbelief. 
And day by day and night by night, unconsciously, 
The heart lives by that faith the lips deny ; — 
God knows the why." 

Finally — and most important of all — let us not 
worry ourselves so much about the intellectual opin- 
ions of men ; but look rather to their spiritual condi- 
tion. The Church ought to think less of creed and 
more of character. The essence of faith lies not in 
correct conclusions upon doctrinal points ; but in 
righteousness and love and trustful submission to 
God's will. No scepticism concerning dogmas touches 
the heart of religion. If that seems at all heretical, 
let me cite good Orthodox authority. I might quote 
Bishop Thirlwall of the Church of England, in his 
judgment concerning Colenso's attack upon the ac- 
curacy of the history of the Exodus in the Pentateuch, 
— that " this story, — nay the whole history of the Jew- 
ish people, has no more to do with our faith as Chris- 
tians, than the extraction of the cube or the rule of 
three." Or I might quote Canon Farrar's weighty 
words in an article upon the true test of religion. 
" The real question," he declares, " to ask about any 
form of religious belief, is : Does it kindle the fire of 
love ? Does it make the life stronger, sweeter, purer, 
nobler ? Does it run through the whole society like 
a cleansing flame, burning up that which is mean and 
base, selfish and impure ? If it stands that test it is 
no heresy." That answers the question as aptly as it 



196 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

does manfully. And to the same effect is that notable 
saying of Dr. Mcllvaine at the Presbyterian Presbytery 
a few years ago, when, quoting the admission of one 
evangelical minister that it was the Unitarian Marti- 
neau who had saved his soul and kept his Christian 
faith from shipwreck, he added significantly, "you 
must first find God in your soul before you can find 
Him elsewhere." Yes — the prime and essential thing 
is to find God in the soul; to worship Him in spirit ; 
by a pure conscience ; by a loyal will ; by a heart full 
of devotion to God's righteousness, and by love to all 
our kind. This is to worship God in truth. And 
what have Calvin's Five points or the composite or 
non-composite origin of the Pentateuch, or the virgin 
birth of Christ to do, with such worship ? If a man 
finds evidence for them, which seems to him satis- 
factory ; very well. But if he cannot honestly credit 
them, — why should we shut the doors of the Church 
against him or threaten him with excommunication ? 
Were these the requirements that Jesus Christ laid on 
his disciples ? Not at all. Look all through the Ser- 
mon on the Mount, — study the Golden Rule, and the 
Parable of the Good Samaritan, or the conditions he 
lays down in his picture of the Last Judgment as the 
conditions of approval by the Heavenly Judge, and 
see if you find anything there about the infallibility of 
scripture or the Apostolic succession or the Deity of 
Christ or any other of the dogmas on account of 
which the ecclesiastical disciplinarians would drive 
out the men whom they are pursuing as heretics. 
How grimly we may fancy Satan (if there be any 
Satan) smiling to himself as he sees great Christian 



MODERN DOGMATISM 197 

denominations wrought up to a white heat over such 
dogmas and definitions, while the practical atheism 
and pauperism and immorality of our great metropolis 
is passed over with indifference. Sunday after Sun- 
day, the Christian pulpit complains that the great 
masses of the people keep away from their communion 
tables and do not even darken their doors. Does not 
the fault really lie in the folly — I may almost say the 
sin of demanding of men that they believe so many 
things that neither reason nor enlightened moral sense 
can accept, and making of these dogmas, five barred 
gates through which alone there is any admission to 
heaven ? If we wish the Church to regain its hold on 
thinking men it must simplify and curtail its creeds ; 
it must recognize that the love of God is not measured 
by the narrowness of human prejudice and that God's 
arms are open to receive every honest searcher after 
truth. Let him come with all his doubts ; provided 
he come with a pure heart and bring forth the fruits 
of righteousness. Let us no longer pretend that it is 
necessary for a Christian life to know all the mysteries 
of God. Let it no longer be thought a mark of wick- 
edness for a man honestly to hold a conviction differ- 
ent from the conventional standard ; but let us respect 
one another's independent search and judgment of 
truth. True faith consists not in any special theory 
of God or His ways, but in the uplifting of our spirit 
to touch His spirit and the diffusing of whatever grace 
or gift we have received from Him, in generous good 
will amongst our fellows. If the Christian Church is 
to go forward successfully again in the power and 
spirit of that Master whom it constantly invokes as 



198 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

" the way ; the truth and the life " ; it must make that 
way and life its guiding truth. It must aim constantly 
at greater simplicity in its teaching, and a broader, 
more fraternal cooperation in Christian work. Its 
motto should be the motto of the early Church — " In 
essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all 
things, — charity." Then shall a new and grander 
career open before its upward footsteps. 



CHAPTER IX. 

UNION OF THE CHURCHES IN ONE SPIRITUAL HOUSEHOLD. 

Fairest of the dreams of early Christianity was the 
dream of a single household of God, where all the 
children of the Heavenly Father, of whatever race or 
tongue, should be brought together into one great 
family, in the bond of mutual love and a common 
worship. It was the prayer of Jesus, in that last 
tender hour with His disciples before His arrest. It 
was the vision that inspired Paul to such heroic 
labors ; it was the aspiring flame that rose up from the 
hearts of the Apostles on the day of Pentecost, to call 
down on them the Holy Spirit, in whose solvent of 
loving sympathy Parthians and Medes, Elamites, 
Jews and Arabians, all understood their neighbor as 
if each spake in his own tongue. From century to 
century, indeed, the realization of this dream has, 
from causes too numerous to mention, constantly 
eluded the world. Still the dream has kept its hold 
on the human heart, and many brave attempts have 
been made to give it earthly incarnation. The new 
spirit of brotherhood which Jesus communicated has 
worked as a blessed leaven ; and loud as the clash of 
Babel voices has been at times, yet the still small 
voice of human fellowship has kept whispering its 
counsels of love and peace. Those who note the ebb 
and flow of religious currents, have observed all 

199 



200 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

through the last quarter century a great rising in this 
tide ; and, in the great religious assemblies connected 
with the World's Fair at Chicago, the attendance and 
speakers at which came from the most distant quarters 
of the globe, that tide of common spiritual sympathy- 
rose to a height never before chronicled in history. 

Unprecedented in size and material, and artistic 
magnificence, as the Chicago Exposition was, it was 
still more unprecedented and remarkable in its as- 
tonishing Parliament of Religions. To get together 
on the same platform Trinitarian and Unitarian, 
Monotheists and Polytheists, Roman cardinals and 
Free Religious Lecturers, Greek archbishops and 
Protestant presbyters, Buddhist monks and Confucian 
moralists, expounders of the Bible, the Koran and 
the Avesta, was indeed a marvel. But when from the 
lips of these representatives of diverse sects, whose 
ancestors had persecuted and cursed and battled with 
one another so bitterly ; when alike from the yellow 
robed Buddhists or the scarlet robed Catholic, from 
the Greek ecclesiastic in his black gown, the Hindu in 
his red, or the Shinto in his white vestments, came 
the same sentiments of righteousness, aspiration and 
good-will ; and in their advocacies of their own faith, 
earnest as they were, scarcely a word fell that could 
give offense to those of rival faith — it seemed, indeed, 
a new day of Pentecost, a descent of the holy dove of 
the Spirit, beneath a rainbow of blended spiritual rays, 
as comforting as that which foretold to Noah and his 
sons the end of storm and wrath upon fee renovated 
earth. Every one who read the inspiring accounts of 
these meetings, where the representatives of these 



UNION OF THE CHURCHES 201 

varied faiths exchanged such pleasant words of amity 
and mutual respect, must have been impelled to ask : 
why may not this Pentecostal fellowship be main- 
tained? Why may not Jew and Gentile, Roman and 
Protestant, Christian and Parsee and Brahman, be 
united, not merely for a few days, in some public 
meeting, but constantly, in daily life, in the unity of 
the Spirit and the bonds of peace ; and thus 

"The whole round earth be bound 
With golden chains about the throne of love " ? 

There is certainly in the religious world a great 
yearning, both conscious and unconscious towards 
this end. There is a great Providential movement of 
the waters, recalling the churches of the world from 
their divisions to a new fellowship. The reasons for 
breaking through the old sectarian fences and for bring- 
ing together in brotherly hand-claspings those who are 
working for common ends, are patent to every one 
who will open his eyes. What needless divisions and 
superfluous multiplicity of sects are there. Our last 
United States census enumerates 143 different religious 
denominations, each with its own special organization, 
ritual and special belief. There are half a dozen 
diverse varieties of Lutherans; twelve of Presby- 
terians ; twelve of Mennonites ; thirteen of Baptists ; 
and seventeen varied ecclesiastical stripes of Metho- 
dists. The differences between these are of a minor 
order ; — the race or European nation from which they 
came, or the color of the skin of the members, or 
some minute difference as to the use of baptismal 
water or musical instruments, or prevenient or par- 



202 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

ticular grace. They are as near one another as 
brothers and sisters of one family ; and yet the smaller 
the theologic or ritual differences between them, 
the stronger oftentimes are their antipathies and 
aversions. Through this sectarian rivalry, little 
villages of 1,200 or 1,500 people, only able to sustain 
one pastor, have three, four or five meeting-houses of 
different faiths, closed half the time. The ministers 
receive but a quarter of the salary they should; 
charities languish; social life is embittered; and on 
all sides the Christian life of our smaller communities 
exhibits a deplorable inefficiency, waste, ill-will, and 
useless friction. John Adams once said : " This 
would be a pretty good world if there were no religion 
in it." Doubtless, it was these evils into which a 
narrow and petty sectarianism so often runs, which 
had called forth this impatient outburst. But this 
sectarian rivalry and bigotry is really as alien to the 
spirit of true religion as it is to that of human brother- 
hood. The growth and multiplication of sects was, in 
its origin, a movement in the direction of greater 
liberty and stricter loyalty to Christ and God. 

But to-day, it is becoming the greatest hindrance 
and prejudice to the life of the soul and the health of 
Christendom. Where men become filled with a living 
sense of their kinship to the Eternal Spirit and to 
each other, they come with joy to see that this kin- 
ship is not confined to their one little church en- 
closure. They realize the deeper agreements which 
underlie their surface differences. They have com- 
mon aims and are bound together by common 
interests. They serve, in their different ways, 



UNION OF THE CHURCHES 203 

one and the same Maker and righteous Law- 
giver. They would all lift humanity out of the 
ooze of vice and evil, and enthrone the spirit 
above the flesh. In the materialism and animal- 
ism of the world they have a common foe ; 
and in faith in the soul within and the hopes of its 
larger and fuller life beyond the portals of death they 
have their common encouragement and support. 

Every church, therefore, that has fought earnestly 
in this common battle has made, and is making, some 
valuable contribution to the spiritual victory sought. 
There is good in all the churches ; some special, 
varied need of the human heart which each one 
meets. The candid scholar is obliged to recognize 
how much humanity owes to each of the great 
branches of the Christian vine ; to the Roman for its 
comprehensiveness, its steadfastness, its wonderful 
government of the masses ; to Methodism for its zeal 
and cordial warmth ; to the Episcopal for its dignity 
and enlistment in Christian service of the aesthetic 
sensibilities ; to the liberal Christian for his light and 
culture ; to the Calvinist for his consistent logic and 
stern inflexibility ; to the Congregationalist for his de- 
fense of spiritual independency; to our latest born 
denomination, the Salvation Army, for its ardent de- 
votion to the rescue and salvation of those whom the 
respectable churches usually ignore. And outside the 
Christian pale, the great Oriental faiths have also each 
some spiritual lesson or precious ethical impulse to 
contribute that makes each a helpful and holy acolyte 
in the great cathedral of the world's worship. Bud- 
dhism has its spirit of self-renunciation and universal 



204 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

compassion, that would spare the life and pain even of 
the humblest insect. Mohammedanism has its sublime 
submission to the divine and its scrupulous sobriety ; 
Confucianism its filial fidelity ; Parseeism its punctil- 
ious purity, truthfulness and rectitude. 

And not only has each some special excellence, but 
in their basal chords there is a noteworthy harmony. 
Let me quote on this point the significant declaration 
of an eminent Roman Catholic dignitary, made at 
Chicago. I refer to the words of Archbishop Ireland, 
on one of the opening days of the Parliament of 
Religions : " There is a great common ground in all 
religions, consisting of the vital and primordial truths 
about the infinite spiritual reality." All Christian 
sects are united in these common Christian truths, 
which as one sacred choir they chant in unison. And 
even when we pass outside the Christian pale, we find 
these fundamental truths — God, duty, immortality, the 
authority of truth, the sacredness of love — reechoed 
by Jew and Gentile, Parsee, Arab, Brahman and 
Chinese in concordant strains, which as they ascend 
to the Divine ear, doubtless blend in a single sym- 
phony of praise and prayer. 

The more carefully we study the varied religions of 
the globe the more sure are we that none is wholly 
false. Each has its valuable and needed truth. But 
none, on the other hand, has the whole circle of pure 
truth. Each but gives us a segment of it. The 
keener our discernment of truth becomes, the clearer 
we see how fragmentary is that single m'ember, finger, 
foot or eye, that any one denomination possesses. 
The partial truth which each sect illustrates makes us 



UNION OF THE CHURCHES 205 

long for that fuller beauty and perfection which can 
only be secured by bringing every limb and member, 
obscure and uncomely as it may be, into the one 
complete body that makes the God-designed whole. 

Church unity is undoubtedly therefore a desirable 
thing. And I believe it is possible. It is more than 
that. As noble Dr. Barrows, of the Presbyterian 
Church, the originator and organizer of the Parlia- 
ment of Religions, has said : " It is a necessity. It 
is being forced upon us by the scandal and weakness 
of schism. It is our business to make the conditions 
of life more tolerable here below ; to bridge over the 
chasms which separate the rich and the poor, to push 
back the evil forces of crime, intemperance and vice, 
that have thriven through our disunion." 

The practical question next presents itself: How 
may this be accomplished ? How may we reunite the 
dissevered branches of Christendom ? How may we 
bring into being that universal church, where every 
child of God, groping for the truth or longing for 
human sympathy, may find a spiritual home ? 

For a long time now, this has been an object of 
earnest thought, both by thoughtful individuals and by 
many great denominations ; and no small number of 
solutions have been proposed. The English Church 
in the celebrated Lambeth proposals, offered as olive 
branches of peace the Nicene creed ; the authority of 
the scriptures ; the historic episcopate, and the sacra- 
ments of baptism and the Lord's supper. The Roman 
Church has a much simpler proposition ; all it asks is 
submission to the Pope. Protestant orthodoxy has 
suggested the Trinity, atonement and other doctrines, 



206 THE NEW WOULD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

agreed upon by the Evangelical Alliance. The Ethical 
Culture societies believe a purely ethical basis would 
unite all in a single organization, in freedom, fellow- 
ship and character. 

These various movements and proposals have each 
failed practically to heal the divisions, or gain any 
acceptance approaching universality. The universal 
Church must have a broader basis than uniformity of 
sacraments or ritual. These are material and out- 
ward. The essence of religion is spiritual and inward. 
It lies in that communion which needs neither plate 
nor cup; in that sacrament of the self-surrendered 
heart which unites the soul with its God, as firmly 
without either wine or water as with them. The uni- 
versal Church, again, cannot be circumscribed by limits 
of race or nationality. Color is only skin deep. In 
the sight of God, as Rabbi Hirsch says : " It is the 
black heart, not the black skin, which excludes ; it is 
the crooked act, not the curved nose, that ostracizes. 
. . . The day of exclusive national religions is 
past, the God of the universe should speak to all 
mankind." 

Neither can religious unity be based upon an iden- 
tical creed. These minute and detailed confessions of 
faith and catalogues of dogma are thorn-hedges, set 
up for the wounding and cramping of every large 
mind and progressive thought. A man may repeat 
all the creeds without skipping a syllable, and say " I 
believe " after every Article, and yet have never taken 
the first step in the Christian life ; and 'another may 
have followed in the very footsteps of Jesus, surren- 
dering his very heart's blood in his complete devotion 



UNION OF THE CHURCHES 207 

to God and man ; and yet, through some intellectual 
scrupulosity, not be able to find one of all the churches' 
creeds that he can assent to. Our belief is not a mat- 
ter we can change at will ; and it becomes increasingly 
evident that uniformity of dogma should not be de- 
manded as the sine qua non of religious fellowship. 
As a broad-minded Methodist (Rev. Frank M. Bristol) 
has recently said : " Christianity is becoming more 
and more a life and a hope, and less and less a dogma 
and a theory. To me the test is as to a man's sin- 
cerity. When I know a man is sincere, that is enough. 
I want his hand and his fellowship in the common 
work of bettering the world." 

Nor, once more, have I any confidence in seeing 
religious unity secured by ecclesiastical organization ; 
by the swallowing up of weak sects by stronger rivals ; 
by the voluntary surrender of modern churches to 
that which can show the greatest flavor of antiquity; 
by the supersedure of the many old denominations by 
churchly fusions ; by some brand new organization of 
a more flexible and comprehensive nature ; or by some 
nebulous pet phrase, that soon becomes as rigid a 
shibboleth as any of old. The older a denomination 
is, the more fossilized and unfit for present uses it is 
apt to be. And the new movement that, by its de- 
lightfully vague and elastic character, promises to 
engulf and erase all the old churches, usually ends by 
adding but another name to the long catalogue of 
petty and obscure sects. As has been aptly said, 
" A novel does not escape from being a novel by 
dubbing itself i The no-name series/ " Great church 
administrations, like great political bodies, are un- 



208 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

wieldy and undesirable. To fuse into one ecclesias- 
tical body, denominations with diverse tendencies, such 
as the Catholics and the Quakers, the Greek Christians 
and the Congregationalists, would be a useless experi- 
ment. Unite them to-day, to-morrow they would fall 
apart. Even could one church absorb all the rest, it 
would not be desirable. In the one spiritual body as 
in the material, a variety of members, administrations 
and gifts is needed. Each should be developed after 
its own special aptitude, so that thus the varying needs 
of our many-sided human nature might be met. 

What then is needed ? It is that in all should be 
shown one and the selfsame Divine Spirit, working all 
in harmony. In the unity of the spirit and the bond 
of peace, let each fulfil its God-appointed mission. If 
any one branch of Christendom is ever to absorb all 
others ; if Christendom is ever to absorb Brahmanism, 
or Brahmanism to absorb Christianity, — that is some- 
thing we are not yet prepared for. 

If it could be brought about to-day, it would not 
enrich and advance the fulness of religion, but would 
impoverish it. Protestantism has still too much to 
learn from Catholicism and Catholicism has too much 
to learn from Protestantism, and Christendom too much 
to learn from the Oriental faiths, and they too much to 
learn from us, to make it desirable yet awhile. As the 
broad-minded Hindu, Kananda, said at the Parliament of 
Religions : the motto on the banner of the religions of 
the future will be : " Help, and not fight ; assimilation, 
not destruction ; harmony, not dissensiQn." Or to quote 
Christian authority, as the catholic-minded apostle to 
the Gentiles wrote in the first century : " If the whole 



UNION OF THE CHURCHES 209 

body were an eye, where were the hearing? if the 
whole were hearing, where were the smelling ? " So 
we may ask : if all Christians were conservatives, where 
were progress and new growth ? If all were pioneers, 
where were the rear-guard and the base of sup- 
plies ? 

In the midst of our nation's bitterest and bloodiest 
sectional strife, Abraham Lincoln, in his Presidential 
message, uttered these memorable words: "With 
malice towards none, with charity for all, with firm- 
ness in the right, let us strive to bind up the nation's 
wound, to do all which may achieve a just and last- 
ing peace among ourselves and with all nations." 

It is in this spirit that the various branches of Chris- 
tendom, the diverse members of the household of God, 
Catholic or Protestant, Christian or pagan, should work 
and seek each other's hands. 

What, then, are the elements and demands of such 
a unity of spirit? In the first place, all sects and 
churches should give to each other mutual respect — 
not mere toleration. That word tolerance is itself in- 
tolerant ; a sign of patronizing conceit and narrowness. 
We should give more ; we should give esteem, rever- 
ence and fraternal consideration to every other servant 
and worshiper of our common Father and Lawgiver. 
When we know that a brother has earnestly and 
honestly searched for the truth, let that be a sufficient 
ground for our regard. Let the churches recognize 
the value and validity of each other's ministrations. 
By the same comity, by which a marriage in one state, 
in accordance with its laws, is recognized also as a 
marriage in neighbor states, — so should the baptism 



210 TEE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

or admission to Christian membership or ordination 
to the ministry given by one branch of the Christian 
Church, be recognized as good and spiritually efficient 
by all other branches. 

2. Let the attention of the churches be directed to 
their higher ends, not their lower mechanical and 
administrative details. Let them fix their eyes and 
efforts on the great things in which they agree, not on 
the little things in which they differ. As Dean 
Stanley has so well shown, there is a common Chris- 
tianity, in which all branches of Christendom are one ; 
— that love of God and man, that sacredness of duty 
and hope of heaven which is what makes the gospel 
dear to the human heart. The points over which the 
denominations divide, — episcopacy, immaculate con- 
ception of the Virgin, infallibility of the Pope, baptism 
by immersion or sprinkling, inerrancy of scripture, 
predestination of the elect — are points about which 
Christ cared too little ever to drop a word. One of 
the familiar stories is of a lady who, when asked if she 
was a Christian, said she was not sure that she was a 
Christian, but she was certain she was a Baptist. 
How many are there similarly who care little for re- 
ligion, but are ardent Presbyterians, pronounced 
Methodists, bigoted Unitarians. If we are to gain any 
religious unity, we must reverse this. Christians must 
remember that higher and more binding than the 
allegiance due to presbyter, conference, synod or 
Pope, is their allegiance to Christ and to God. Above 
all denominational leaders — Luther, Calvin, Wesley or 
Channing — they should put their Lord and Master, 
Jesus ; and above all religions, Christian and Pagan, 



UNION OP THE CHURCHES 211 

they should enthrone the loyalty to truth and righteous- 
ness without which each loses its saving salt. 

3. There are, alas, plenty of things that tend to 
separate and divide the forces of religion ; but when 
you scrutinize these, — be they bigotry and prejudice, 
or envy, ambition, rivalry, the virus of party spirit, — 
they none of them properly belong within the Church. 
They are werewolves of irreligion that, in the guise of 
defenders of the faith once delivered to the saints, have 
cunningly crept in where they have no right to be, 
and in the name of the Lord are busy pulling down 
the work that Christ's heart was set upon. All the 
great and eternal forces of the religious realm, on the 
contrary, are things that should unite, not divide 
humanity. As we promote any of these, — knowledge, 
righteousness, brotherly love, — we are bringing in 
to its rightful recognition the religious unity of the 
world. 

See, for example, how the spread of knowledge, 
both spiritual and scientific, tends to unity. How 
many of the old barriers and arbitrary interpretations 
and blighting worship of the letter has modern Bib- 
lical criticism swept out of the way ; and how many 
dark cobwebs of antiquated theology, that filled pious 
hearts with black despair, has science cleared off from 
the windows of faith ! When Christian missionaries 
go to the heathen with theologies almost as baseless 
and superstitious as the heathen's own, they knock in 
vain for entrance. The shrewd pagans say, as a clever 
Japanese did to an orthodox missionary : " We have 
enough devils and hells of our own to believe in al- 
ready, without adding any foreign ones." But if our 



212 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

missionaries, instead, would carry with them the light 
of modern knowledge and diffuse our demonstrable 
science of the universe and its laws, this would, in a 
generation, melt away this vast ice-sheet of supersti- 
tions and false theories which form the foundation of 
their native idolatries and polytheisms. If we ever 
hope to supersede Paganism by Christianity or estab- 
lish any religious fraternity and affiliation of the two, 
this is the path by which we must secure it. To 
evolve and ripen the truly Catholic or Universal 
Church, we must get illumination and sunshine from 
all quarters. They who think that from their single, 
personal or denominational standpoint they can see 
the whole circumference and fix the exact position 
and outline of absolute truth, show that they have 
still much to learn. There is a lesson on this point 
that the scientific world might give the Church. 
When a great phenomenon, such as the transit of 
Venus, takes place, no single astronomer nor any one 
astronomical observatory is conceited enough to think 
it can do*the whole work satisfactorily, single-handed. 
They club their resources. They portion out the con- 
tinent, and each group of astronomers proceeds to a 
different point of observation, before agreed upon, in 
friendly cooperation. Then, after the observation is 
taken, the personal equation — that is, the allowance 
for error, in noting the time, due to the individual 
peculiarities of each observer — is carefully allowed 
for. Then, the various observations are compared 
and one rectified by the others, and correction also 
made for the latitude and longitude and state of the 
atmosphere at each respective point of observation, 



UNION OF THE CHURCHES 213 

and finally the whole added and averaged. It is only 
by such cooperation and mutual rectification of one 
another's tendencies to error that astronomers secure 
results that they put any confidence in. And so, be- 
fore the religious world can demand confidence in its 
spiritual perceptions, it must take equal care to elimi- 
nate from them the twists and refractions of personal 
idiosyncrasies and sectarian prejudices. It must be 
hospitable minded and ready to accept new truth and 
fuller light from whatever quarter it may be gained. 
" The spirit (the Christian Union has well said) that in- 
sists that every man shall see what every other man 
teaches, — no more, no less, no different, — is the spirit 
of schism. It is unchristian, and anti-Christian, be- 
cause it is the spirit of conceit. It belittles truth ; it 
divides and subdivides the Christian Church. It never 
has promoted Christian union, and it never can." 

The method that leads there is the opposite one 
that encourages every soul to exercise that right of 
private judgment which Luther vindicated, and is glad 
to see Mount Zion pictured from just as mfyjy diverse 
angles as possible, knowing that thus alone can a 
complete representation of the infinite truth be ob- 
tained. 

And in the next place, as a fourth step in this 
staircase, we should place the stone of righteousness, 
— the practical service of our God and our fellow-men. 
While a man's chief thought is for his own soul's sal- 
vation, he clutches at any solitary plank that may 
float him on the wave; but when he gets to that 
higher view of religion that identifies the holy life 
with the helpful life, at once he reaches out a brotherly 



214 THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW THOUGHT 

hand to his neighbor. Jesus said that the second 
commandment is like unto, or born of, the firsthand 
surely no one can be trusted to love the God he has 
not seen, if he love not the brother he has seen. 
Where there is that enthusiasm for humanity which 
befits the follower of Him who wished to be called the 
Son of Man, there the interest in dogmatic hair-split- 
ting drops to the proper subordination. When we 
realize what the fight with evil means to-day ; what 
Christians have got to do when they undertake vigor- 
ously to grapple with the saloon question, the Sunday 
question, the problem of poverty and abuse of child- 
hood ; when we get in earnest in the work of eleva- 
ting our race, of suppressing vice, of inspiring men 
with a genuine love of purity and with living faith in 
their kinship to the Eternal Spirit and to each other, 
— then we see that we have no time for denomina- 
tional quarrels ; we see that these common needs of 
suffering humanity call for the united energies of all 
the Lord's soldiers if we ever expect to establish the 
kingdom of God on earth ; and instead of the present 
emulation to make converts from one another or get a 
longer list of church members, the only rivalry will 
be a rivalry in bettering the world and an emulation 
of each other's virtues. 

For many generations the mediaeval alchemists 
sought for a universal solvent. In the physical realm, 
the search is a vain one. But in the spiritual realm, 
we need not go far for it. Love is that universal 
solvent which unloosens all bonds ; a tincture that 
carries with it healing for every wound. With this 
password, one should be able to pass through every 



UNION OF THE CHURCHES 215 

interdenominational camp and army and find himself 
everywhere a citizen of the Divine kingdom. With- 
out love, belief, be it never so close to the creed, is 
but sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal. And so 
religious unity, however huge be the single organiza- 
tion formed, however tight be the bonds of its univer- 
sal Church, would be (when love is absent) but an 
ecclesiastical tyranny; an iron band, fatal to every 
growing shoot of the living vine. But where there is 
a positive Christian love, a spirit of sympathy and 
helpfulness to every neighbor, — what can bar out such 
a spirit from the holy communion? Suppose that 
your religious brethren give you only their indiffer- 
ence or hate. You can still give them the guerdon of 
your charity, the fragrant olive branch of your un- 
stinted good will. There is an excellent New Eng- 
land story of an old Puritan, who, when he was ex- 
communicated by the Church, declined to be cut off 
from their communion. For twenty years the good 
old man came, whenever the Lord's Supper was ob- 
served, bringing with him his own bit of bread and 
draught of wine, and in his own pew communed with 
the Church in spite of the Deacon's boycott. When 
a man carries the Christ-spirit with him, the fellowship 
of all the saints becomes his. Love is a communion- 
cup, which it needs no priest to fill, and which always 
gives the good man membership in the Church invisi- 
ble, whatever the Church visible may say. 

Such, then, are the needed seeds of religious unity : 
— regard for essentials — not inessentials ; mutual 
respect ; devotion to knowledge and righteousness J 
and above all, a broad charity and friendly sympathy. 



216 THE NEW WORLD AND TEE NEW THOUGHT 

Without these, no ecclesiastical fusions, no hierarchical 
organization, however extensive or compact, can give 
a religious unity that is worth anything. The pro- 
motion of this broad Christian spirit is the first and 
chief step. But where these spiritual roots are planted 
and made to grow, there they will naturally bloom 
and bear fruit in some sort of practical fraternity ; and 
the encouragement of such outward fellowship again 
will foster and quicken the inward fellowship. It 
ought to lead at once to a large measure of cooper- 
ation. The smaller and kindred sects, whose differ- 
ences are slight, ought to be willing to consolidate. 
The seventeen kinds of Methodists and the thirteen 
kinds of Baptists and the twelve kinds of Presby- 
terians, holding beliefs and usages substantially the 
same, might unite, one would think, without any 
serious sacrifice, and with a great saving of needless 
rivalry and waste. The same is true among the 
liberal churches. The difference between Unitarians 
and Universalists is one altogether too slight to justify 
their continued separation and rivalship. Where the 
kindred sects can thus honorably consolidate, let them 
do so. They ought to do so. And where this is not 
possible, let them try such looser methods of alliance 
as may bring them into harmony, without sacrificing 
what they consider essential principles. Following 
the political example of the union of our several 
states in the one United States, they might (without 
abandoning their independent liberties and local or 
special administrations) unite in federal unions, of 
most valuable kinds. Such movements as the Evan- 
gelic Alliance, the Pan-Presbyterian Assemblies, the 



UNION OF THE CHURCHES 217 

Church Congresses of later years are all commendable 
efforts in this direction. Without gaining legislative 
authority, such Congresses carry weightier moral 
authority and cultivate the unity of spirit and practical 
cooperation which is so valuable to-day. Still more ex- 
cellent, because more filled with the spirit of a genuine 
catholicity, is the Laymen's League of our Western 
frontier, and the Brotherhood of Christian Unity, 
started recently in New York by Professor Seward, 
and our Father's Church, instituted by the Rev. Page 
Hopps, of London. In these latter, all dogmatic 
tenets are dropped ; love to God and man under the 
leadership of Jesus is the only creed, and orthodox 
and heterodox alike are invited to membership. No 
one is asked to give up his special denominational 
connection, but for the sake of practical Christian 
effort, they associate themselves on a perfectly simple 
basis without regard to evangelical creeds. What 
may be the future of these new and broader fellow- 
ships that would stretch their lines across all denomi- 
nations, remains to be seen. But as far as they can 
bring Christians into helpful cooperation for the bet- 
terment of human life, they must do good. Hence- 
forth I hope to see all branches of Christendom peri- 
odically meeting in some general assembly, for mutual 
fraternity, counsel and inspiration; and the grand 
Parliament of Religions may, I trust, prove to be but 
the first of a series of similar conferences, a federation 
of the religious world, both Christian and Pagan, to 
advance the great interests they have in common. 
But without waiting for any such imposing assem- 
blages or new organizations, there is a work for each 



218 THE NEW WOBLD AND TEE NEW THOUGHT 

Christian close at hand, quite as important. In all 
our cities and towns there is a need and opportunity, 
without more ado, for friendly co-working among all 
sects. There are moral reforms, social problems, calls 
of human misery, educational and philanthropic enter- 
prises that demand the collected efforts of all Christian 
hearts, without distinction of sect or faith. In our 
smaller villages, certainly, steps ought to be taken 
either for the direct union of the many poverty- 
stricken chapels that struggle with each other for ex- 
istence ; or else for their dissolution and reconstruction 
on some honorable basis which will provide for freedom 
and fellowship in worship. 

Whatever dogmatism or sectarian ambition divides 
and impoverishes the forces that are battling to main- 
tain righteousness and uplift humanity is a form of 
anti-Christ. Whatever can bring these forces into 
closer union and a firmer front ; whatever can make the 
people learn to think of the church as one body in 
many members, — be it pulpit exchanges between the 
clergy of different denominations ; city Ministerial As- 
sociations, or State Conferences of religion, embracing 
all denominations; union meetings for prayer or 
thanksgiving ; common communion-services, open to 
members of all denominations of Christians, without 
invidious distinctions, — any signal of a broader good- 
will between the churches, erasing sectarian divisions, 
however trivial it may be, is helping forward the prayer 
of the Master that " they all may be one." 

Of one blood, says Paul, are we all made. With 
God, the common Father, there is no respect of per- 
sons. One and the same heaven is the haven of peace 



UNION OF THE CHURCHES 219 

and love we all seek. Back of every varied soul and 
symbol stands the one Holy Spirit, by whose in- 
spiration the holy men that founded each diverse 
church spake as they were moved in their respective 
age and land. No path of prayer but has lifted men 
nearer God ; no creed has man framed but was as the 
broken lispings of an infant, beside the unutterable 
perfection of the Divine. 



MAR 1 3 1903 



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1COPV DLL u w\I,0IV. 
MAR. 13 1902 




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